SOURCE: "Flakes, Nuts and Capitalists," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 30, 1993, pp. 2, 11.

Cohen is an American educator, novelist, and short story writer. In the following review, he maintains that, despite Boyle's prodigious comedic gifts, The Road to Wellville proves too shallow and crude to sustain interest.

One of the more endearing and exasperating facets of the American appetite is its hunger for self-improvement. Think of Bill Moyers and his attentive, homespun, secular romanticism; he roams from coast to coast like a political candidate—our candidate—on an eternal campaign for betterness, for a philosophy or paradigm that will lend coherence to our lives on this messy, bloated continent. If the old religions fail to serve us, we invent new ones—or recycle slightly used ones. If nothing else, it keeps us busy.

It keeps our satirists busy, too, of course. And none more prolifically or acutely so...