Product Description

They're tearing down Bart Dawes's home, leveling his memories, and destroying his past, all for a new highway extension. Funny what that kind of progress can do to a man. Scary, too.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54450 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780451197870
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
King mesmerizes the reader. -- Chicago Sun-Times

Review
King mesmerizes the reader. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Customer Reviews

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.

A tale of the first energy crisis...
Roadwork starts off suspensefully, as a crazed man with a knack for carrying on conversations with himself buys a high-caliber rifle and a .44 Magnum revolver. However, the explosive result of this purchase, which you might expect to be soon coming, doesn't arrive until the very end of the book. To get there, we must wade through some very dense, overly-detailed (but very well written) exposition.

Bart Dawes has finally been pushed too far; at age 40, he's lost his only son to a brain tumor, and now the public works commission has decided to build a new highway system, which will not only go through (and thereby erase) the building Bart's worked in for the past twenty years, but also his home. Bart must move, but he refuses to. In the process, Bart will lose his job, his friends, his wife, and his sanity, but he stands strong in his refusal to leave his home, reminiscent in a way of Hank Stamper in Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion."

Roadwork is different than anything Stephen King (well, Richard Bachman, to be precise) has written; it's more a character study than anything else. As King himself wrote in his "Why I Was Bachman" introduction to the first edition of The Bachman Books, "Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot, because it tries so hard to be good." And that's the whole of it: Roadwork reads like it's been written by a young writer who's trying hard to appeal to the literary crowd. It's verbose, packed with introspection, and moves along at a snail's pace; the total opposite of the Bachman/King extravaganza The Running Man.

It's no surprise that King relates that Roadwork was written at a time when he was trying to impress those elitists whom would ask him at cocktail parties if he'd ever write "something important." (Interestingly, in the second edition of the Bachman Books, in a foreword titled "The Importance of Being Bachman," King states that Roadwork is now his favorite of the Bachman bunch.)

This is not to say Roadwork is a bad book, or even a boring book. It takes dedication to keep turning those pages when you begin reading it, but in time you adjust to the casual pace of the narrative, you begin to learn (and respect) who Bart Dawes is, and you root for him, no matter how nuts he's become.

The ending finally picks up the pace, as Dawes accepts his fate and brings those guns into play, as well as a generous supply of explosives. In that regard, Roadwork packs the suspenseful punch you'd normally associate with the books under Richard Bachman's name. But with its slow pace, grim view on the world (the Bachman view is generally that life sucks, and terrible things happen for no reason), combined with its firm rooting in the 1970s (which might make it inaccessible to those who weren't around in that decade), Roadwork might not appeal to the average King/Bachman fan. However, for those looking for an intense character study that slowly builds to an explosive climax, it comes recommended.

Push me over the edge
how much can one person take?Especially one with an attitude that can lead to the unthinkable?...
Here is a detailed review:The story takes place in an unnamed New England city in the 1970's. Barton George Dawes, grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, is driven off the deep end when he finds that both his home and his business are going to be condemned to make way for the construction of a new interstate highway.

In the introduction to the novel in the collection The Bachman Books King states his disappointment with the work and that a lot of the novel's seemingly melodramatic touches were attempts by him to come to terms with his own mother's death around the time of writing. King states that he was in two minds about reprinting it but decided to in the end in order to give readers an insight into his personality at the time.

Oddly enough, in the introduction to the second edition of The Bachman Books (entitled "The Importance of Being Bachman") King referred to Roadwork as his favorite among the Bachman books.

In the introduction to the first collected works The Backman Books, King states in his essay "Why I Was Bachman", "I think it was an effort to make some sense of my mother's painful death the year before - a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch. Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all... Roadwork tries so hard to be good and find some answers to the conundrum of human pain...enjoy..Nigel