The road to Wellville
Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle's wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives - or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, Jane Smiley in The New York Times Book Reviewcalled The Road to Wellville"a marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end."
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100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- I actually just read The Road to Wellville for the first time a couple weeks ago, and was struck by how much it reminded me of the modern-day startup scene. A profusion of tiny health-food companies, all making extravagant claims and so desperate to raise money that they hawk shares to travelers getting off at the train station. All these companies crowding into tiny Battle Creek, not so much because there was any practical reason for them to be there as because Battle Creek is where health-food companies are supposed to be. A "move fast and break things" attitude that leads to patients getting killed by such "treatments" as bathing in pools of electrified water and prolonged exposure to radium.
The book was written a quarter of a century ago, so it's not like this is a parallel T.C. Boyle explicitly set out to draw. It's just striking how these patterns seem to repeat themselves.
- By the way, have you read or seen The Road to Wellville? Hilarious satire of obsession with health. T.C. Boyle in general makes for a good read. A lot of his stories are written from the perspective of humans being just another animal, with often ridiculous behaviors and compulsions.
