My second reading of this mostly fictional tale of John Harvey Kellogg's health sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, set in the early 1900s and revolving around Kellogg himself (depicted as a quack, in all his eccentric, evangelical, colon-obsessed glory), the wealthy, credulous guests of his sanitarium (some of whom come to distinctly unhealthy ends during their tenures), and the entrepreneurs, shysters and conmen seeking to make it in the breakfast food and/or medical business in the town, and I'm still somewhat at a loss as to what it is about the novel that appeals to me...it's a comic novel, but the comedy is not of the sort to provoke laughter, nor, generally, even a wry smile (nor yet of that very black kind which I often enjoy); it's a novel overflowing with colourful characters, but it never persuades (nor, I think, seeks to persuade) one to invest anything emotionally in those characters; it's a well-told tale, but it isn't, in the end, seemingly about anything (although there is something of a cautionary flavour to it).
But appeal to me it does (just as does the film, although my liking of that latter is less unfathomable given that it's more obviously absurd - in the more everyday, rather than Camusian, sense - than this book, on which it's based). Perhaps it's that sense of absurdity - of the ridiculous mixed up with the mildly grotesque, and all played out in a setting which is entirely 'realistic' - coupled with the novel's Dickensian flavour/flair which gives the book its appeal, too.
