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Roadwork |
...but Vietnam was over...
This page has been visited times since April 9th, 1998.
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Roadwork |
This page has been visited times since April 9th, 1998.
Roadwork begins on a scene straight out of a Martin Scorcese film: a man, with a habit of talking to himself, is purchasing guns from the local weapons supply shop. You know the guy is in over his head; he doesn’t know the first thing about guns. He bluffs his way through the transaction, only interested in buying the biggest. As he leaves the store, he doesn’t seem to know what made him buy the guns in the first place. This is the first sign that things are not quite right with Barton George Dawes – but not the last.
We are made aware from the outset what drives Bart Dawes as he closes in on forty years of age: hatred for the new highway extension being built in his town. Or, rather, through: both Bart’s house and workplace (the Blue Ribbon Laundry; you may recognize this as Margaret White’s place of employ in Carrie) are set to be demolished in the name of progress. He has been duly compensated for his home, and the proposed new location for the Blue Ribbon seems just as good – if not better – than his current location. But Bart, who has been a good husband and employee for twenty years, refuses to be moved.
As we explore this book further, we come to realize Bart’s motivations. The voice he talks to in his head (a common device in King’s work; see Gerald’s Game) is that of his deceased son, Charlie. When Charlie had been alive, he and his father used to call each other by their middle names: Charlie was Fred and Bart was George. This childlike game seems to jar with Bart’s stoic personality, until we come to understand the man more. His wife, Mary, comes to a blatant point midway through the book: “‘[Charlie] was yours!’” she accuses, and he doesn’t argue. Over and over in the novel, we are witness to the powerful bond between father and son … and the guilt that accompanies his death. When he was still very young, Charlie died of a tumor, buried too deep in his brain to be operable. Bart, years later, continues to blame himself for not being able to stop the tumor; as a father, he feels he failed his son. Now, he sees this roadwork as another kind of cancer, eating through the memory of Charlie and his tenuous hold on his own past. This time, he’ll try anything to stop it.
Roadwork is a book originally written under the name Richard Bachman, and all the Bachman motifs are there: chapters which mark time, a downbeat ending, a lone man against oppressive forces of government and/or society who must conspire with other outsiders. But Roadwork is different than the others, in a way. This is not a science-fiction scenario set in the future, or a supernatural horror novel, or a teenage revenge fantasy. Roadwork is a novel of a normal man who has been pushed too far. It’s all too believable the tale of a man who we witness in the middle of a breakdown of sanity. In its broader strokes, it fits the Bachman mold perfectly; in its finer points, this book is very much King, reminiscent more of Pet Sematary than any of the other Bachman books. It is the tale of a man struggling too hard to preserve the memory of his child, only to find his own destruction waiting at the end.