Want to read an entertaining account of the health-food craze of a century ago? Read The Road to Wellville
I’ve written before about my love of T.C. Boyle’s writing. There was the captivating short story in Esquire about a couple stuck on a cruise ship during Covid and also several novels and short stories that frequently reach the heights of brilliance.
The Road to Wellville may be his most well-known work. Although I’ve never seen the movie, I have now conquered the epic 1993 novel from which it was based. I knew I would love it because it’s generally true fiction about the great cereal wars of the early 1900s in Battle Creek, Michigan—a topic right up my pop-culture-loving alley!
It took me a really long time to read—somewhere in the range of two months—but don’t let that deter you. The characters and story are so unforgettable that you could step away for weeks at a time, jump back in where you left off, and you’ll be mesmerized all over again without batting an eyelid. Every sentence and every paragraph is a Shakespeare- or Oscar Wilde-level master class in wit, hilarity, and big-word storytelling.
Another element that had me returning every time was the odd way Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s healthy-living sanitarium truly made me want to eat better. By the end, it turned out that healthy eating and living was really not the moral of the story. But for a time, the novel’s paths down those directions were enough to lead me to discover a very cool app called Yuka, which allows you to scan food and some other products to determine how healthy they are (on a scale of 0 to 100—Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, incidentally, earns a 0), how many hazardous chemicals they include, and what those hazards will do to your innards.
Will and Eleanor Lightbody are the protagonists in the mold of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel begins with them on the way to Kellogg’s sanitarium to clean up their debaucherous lifestyles, with Will not exactly onboard. Meanwhile, Charles Ossining has arrived in Battle Creek and is attempting to launch of cereal company called Per-Fo. He wants to sell his still-in-the-works Corn Flakes-like concoction to Kellogg, but the good nutritional doctor in no easy sell. Although C.W. Post pops up here and there throughout the novel, it’s mostly Kellogg who rules the roost in Battle Creek and indeed the entire cereal industry.
The main elements that are true in The Road to Wellville are the names of the cereal titans and the fact that there was indeed a healthfood craze that occured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The real-life Kellogg really did found a Battle Creek Sanitarium that is cited as a pioneer in promoting health and wellness through diet, exercise, and other therapies, and he really did invent Corn Flakes.
Most of the rest, meanwhile, is all T.C. Boyle’s wonderous imagination, and it is a true modern classic.
5 out of 5 stars