The Road to Wellville

T. C. Boyle's 1993 novel, THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, is about a (fictional) murder. It is not, however, a murder mystery. It is the story of John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., health perfectionist and guide to others, who cannot accept that he has produced a less than perfect 20 year old in his adopted son George Kellogg. So John Harvey drowns George, with good cause, in a thousand pounds of costly, experimental macadamia butter, "fragrant sloshing unguent froth, baptizing him, purifying him" (Part III, Ch. 10). "... George was an experiment that hadn't worked. ... When an experiment went bad, you had to move on to the next one." When others came to the death scene in the experimental kitchen, Dr Kellogg told them, "'I tried to save him,' he choked, 'and then he said no more.'" His word was accepted and no blame was ever attached to the doctor who had invented various dry cereals, who had preached the health-delivering wonders of nuts, colonic irrigation and breathing radium. He had, we are forced to concede, tried all George's life to "save him." It just hadn't worked. So Kellogg moved on. *****Over and over in this novel, this truly great historical figure, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, is shown to have failed. He could not stop a patient at his Battle Creek Sanatarium, C. W. Post from stealing recipes from Kellogg's office safe and becoming rich through inventing Postum, Grape Nuts and Post Toasties. In every box of Postum, C. W. Post included a little health pamphlet he had written called "The Road to Wellville." *****Dr. Kellogg could not talk wealthy young (30-ish) Will and Eleanor Lighibody out of having sex (very bad for anyone's health) and out of leaving his health regime to return to "the world." Kellogg did succeed in wresting control of the Battle Creek Health Temple away from his patroness, Seventh-Day Adventists founder Sister Ellen G. White. He gradually replaced the originally all Adventist staff. He stopped attending Adventist services. But he remained enmeshed in Mrs. White's ideas about corset-free waists for women, giving up tobacco and alcoholic spirits and not tasting the flesh of animals. *****Another failure: Dr. Kellogg did prevent Charlie Ossining, a young disciple of the ideas of C. W. Post, from getting rich making a cereal marketed as Kellogg's by virtue of enlisting young George Kellogg as a partner. But toward novel's end, a drunken George introduced Charlie to Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, 15 % alcohol. Later, at far lower start-up costs than his failed effort with breakfast cereal, Charlie Ossining remembered Lydia Pinkham's and created Per-To ("Perfect Tonic") with 40% alcohol ("Added Solely as a Solvent and Preservative"). Dr Kellogg would not have been amused. He became a multi-millionaire. *****THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE is funny, on every page. It makes us laugh and laugh again. And laughter, we are taught by French philosopher Henri Bergson is our reaction to an "imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg strives to be perfect in every dimension, not just in healthy living, but as mentor, hospital administrator and lecturer. And he thinks he is perfect. But he is not. Everything he does is exaggerated, out of phase with his deepest, sanest nature: that which he was meant to be. He and the Lighfoots, Charlie Ossining and others all remind us of conditioned reflexes, robots, rats on a treadmill or running a maze. They don't have to be so eccentric. Their imperfections are "immediately correctible." But they are either slow learners or they learn the wrong things. -OOO-