Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12784 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

About the size of a walnut
I read this after reading The Long Walk and couldn't get into it at all to begin with. I found it a little bit dull and difficult to relate to. But as the story progressed I became absolutely engrossed in it, it really becomes difficult to put down. It's incredibly sad at times, but can often be humorous and very suspenseful.

This is a straight novel, no supernatural elements a la' king. In short, its a tale of one man standing in the way of progress, clutching onto the remains of the past with whatever it takes, slowly losing everything and descending into madness.

Stephen King has gone on record as to say that this is the book he wrote at the time of his mother's death and the feelings he was experiencing at the time. Honestly, I think its a very underrated novel, King now claims this as his favourite of the Bachman books where once he said it was his weakest.

King down by the riverside of total social delusion
Stephen King a.k.a. Richard Bachman has flirted with extremes all his life. In this "Roadwork" novel he dances a deathdance around a highway extension that is burning its trail through a city, knocking down into ashes several factories, a few businesses and a good number of quality private homes. He never really wonders if this extension is justified, or not, assuming and even telling at the end, it's only municipal business as usual to keep federal money flowing in. He concentrates on one character, the main character Bart, and he narrates his point of view. This Bart is supposed to be schizophrenic, to have a divided personality and to have discussions with his psychic alter ego, which is not only schizophrenic. Fred meets George a.k.a. Bart and George meets Freddy, but not on Elm Street, though not very far from it. He refuses to see his factory knocked down and his home swallowed up. So he decides to make it hurt to those who think they count more than the average people in the street, since he can't stop it, since we can never stop this carcenogenic tentacular bureaucracy that has a mind not bigger than a wallnut but whose mind is a brain tumor in our own brains. The factory will close instead of being transferred and his home will be blown up instead of being bulldozed down. He will also get the radical divorce he needs by making his wife a widow. And little by little we understand he has become psychotic because the first pregnancy that forced him to marry the unhappy mother, turned out to be a miscarriage, and because his second chance at being a father, Charlie's father, is ruined by a brain tumor that takes the boy to nether-nether-land prematurely. The means used to satisfy his psychotic hunger and schizophrenic thirst are only details. The hunger and the thirst, like a broadway show, have to go on till they are annihilated. He will kill no one because Fred says so, but he will hurt many in their pride. And that is what is necessary in this society that is getting out of hand: burn their pride and destroy their selfrighteousness, even if they have victory in the end. That will flatter your ego though that will stop nothing on their agenda: it is not a few discontented people, even if they are millions in the street and have the media on their side, that will stop the money-making political machinery. These blind mechanisms are unstoppable, even if the servants that managed themare systematically crushed by the system in the end, at best into a name at the bottom of a picture in a history textbook, and most of the time into nothing at all.

King's "mainstream" novel should not be overlooked
I think it's safe to say that Roadwork is King's least-read novel, largely because it represented an attempt on King's part to go straight, to prove he could write a mainstream novel. Written in between 'Salem's Lot and The Shining, Roadwork was released in 1981 as Richard Bachman's third novel. I first read it as a young teenager, and I no longer remembered a great deal about it - except that, at the time, I did find it somewhat boring. King himself has never gone so far as to call Roadwork a good novel. Reading it again now, though, I was surprised by the sophistication and emotional power of the story. You almost have to have experienced some of the pressures of adulthood to really relate to the protagonist, Barton George Dawes, and it really doesn't matter that the story is imbedded in the socioeconomic worries of the early 1970s. In its essence, Roadwork is the story of a man pushed beyond his means of coping with change.

On the face of things, Dawes doesn't have it that bad. He has a good wife, a good job, and friends. Inside, though, he is suffering miserably - and has been since his little boy died of a brain tumor three years earlier. Having never allowed himself to grieve properly, his mind proves unable to bear the disruptions caused by a new local road construction project. He's worked for the same laundry since he got out of school, and it will have to relocate elsewhere because of the roadwork - and he is the one responsible for finding a new site. He's lived in the same house since he got married, and it too has a fateful date with a wrecking ball - and he has to find a new home for him and his wife. It's just too much for him, and he can't do it. He lets the deal fall through on the new laundry site, which costs him his job, and he doesn't even go looking for a new house. Haunted by dreams of his dead son, he's already a broken man - even before he loses his wife and basically his whole life.

We the readers basically watch Bart Dawes go insane as the days pass. We watch him lie to his wife and to himself, drink himself into nightly stupors, procure destructive objects from dangerous men, and plot revenge on those who have taken away the few things in life he could cling to. At the center of his problem is Charlie; George can't understand why his son had to die, and he can't bear the thought of his home, Charlie's home, being destroyed. The plot is somewhat analogous to that of the film Falling Down. Even as we watch Dawes do some terrible things, we can't help but sympathize with a man so beaten down by the cruel vagaries of life.

King has said that Roadwork was in some ways a product of the death of his mother. After working hard to raise King and his brother single-handedly, she died just as King's material success as a writer was beginning. The book served as a vehicle to let him work through his own emotional issues over his loss. Why does a loved one have to die? That question permeates this novel. It's a very personal story, but it is one almost any adult reader can relate to very well. King fans who have passed this novel by would do well to go back and give it a chance - it's much different from King's other novels, but it is a surprisingly impressive exploration of emotional disintegration.