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June 16, 2007
THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE
I'm about 130 pages into T.C. Boyle's 1993 Novel THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE and I am loving it. Boyle wrote another book that I really enjoyed, THE INNER CIRCLE. That book was the anti-KINSEY; both took on the controversial sex doctor as their subject, but while the mediocre film was part hagiography, part extremely conventional biopic, Boyle's bookdealt with the thorny psyche of impulsive living. Kinsey thought that sex was a biological mechanism that should have no emotional ramifications - his top assistant comes to realize this just isn't true. It's a fascinating book about a number of topics: sexual psychology, the 50s, marriage, science, and quasi-godlike figures whose charisma masks a blind, fanatical adherence to some really dangerous ideas.
THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE is even better. Once again (WELLVILLE was written first), Boyle takes on a controversial fanatic of a doctor: the inventor of peanut butter and the corn flake, John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg is the type of overzealot who recommends five enemas a day, but he also knows every single one of his patients and has adopted 42 children. His sanitorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, prescribed a steady, wretched diet of granola, thick, awfulyogurt, and crunchy roots. Into this world come a number of explorers, and each of them have a different interest in the good doctor.
Unlike THE INNER CIRCLE, which exists in a sterile world of labcoats only contrasted by the curious lives of its patients and doctors, WELLVILLE is full of anachronistic humor and vocabulary that makes each new page a compendium of turn-of-the-century factoids. It presents us with a world too quickly becoming modern, and too focused on the perfection of man. Highly recommended.
I'm also reading PARADISE LOST, and I invite anyone who wonts to, to join me in my trip from Hell to Earth and Back Again. It's just as good as advertised. Here's a quick portion that really moved me. As Satan and his archangels are gathered in counsel, Belial points out the symptom of intellectual malaise that causes humanity (or devility) to understand itself.
Thus repuls'd, our final hope
Is flat despair; we must exasperate
Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us, that must be our cure,
To be no more; sad cure; for who would loose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
| By Andytown | 11:23 PM
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Comments
have you read The Tortilla Curtain?
Posted by: jenny o. at June 19, 2007 12:28 AM
have you read The Tortilla Curtain?
Posted by: jenny o. at June 19, 2007 12:29 AM
No, is it good. I may read one more Boyle book this summer. I was thinking his new one, TALK TALK, but I'm open to input.
Posted by: andytown at June 19, 2007 05:12 PM
Ok, sorry I posted that twice. Obviously I'm a little blog operating impaired. I loved the Tortilla Curtain, but I may be biased by my California sentimentality. I appreciated his treatment of immigration and affluence, juxtaposed as they are particularly in places like the west coast. I would expect his other novels to be just as good.
Posted by: jennyo at June 20, 2007 01:33 PM