Crazy, Charismatic, Vegetarian

In the past month, I've read two novels that feature extreme health food cultists: Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux and The Road to Wellville by T. C. Boyle.

Millroy, a fairground magician who nevertheless apparently has the capacity to do Real Magic due to taking control of his bodily functions through a vegetarian eating plan based on the Bible (think: Ezekiel bread) and ritualistic elimination, takes an unhappy teenage girl into his trailer and his life. They leave the fairground behind them, with the girl posing as Millroy's "son," and venture into television (first a children's program, then Sunday preaching), where Millroy becomes a star. A diner devoted to Millroy's eating plan opens. This part of the story is actually pretty interesting, but the whole thing just becomes too much. Once I figured out the only way the story was going to resolve itself, I thought, Oh god, no, please, not that, NO. But yes. Yes, the book ended in an utterly annoying manner.

The Road to Wellville juxtaposes the monotonous existence of the pampered, half-starved, prodded, enema-ed, sexually-deprived rich patients of Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium and the machinations of desperate breakfast cereal speculators (celery-flavored cereal: mmmm) in the crucible of turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, Michigan. I found the first couple of chapters rather boring and difficult to get into (suffering from some of that "now we establish all the characters" problem often afflicting television shows), and put the book aside for a time. But when I was drawn back to it later, I found it a jolly ride.

One sort of disturbing things about these satirical novels is that their nutso health gurus appear to advocate super narrowly defined diets that are, however, more diverse and balanced than that of my two raw-foodist aunts who, last I heard, eat basically the very same thing at every meal. (OK, they do better than the poor guy at the sanitarium who was on the milk diet, then the grape diet, but those were merely short-term treatments, not intended to be diets for a lifetime.)