Books: Roadwork By Richard Bachman (1981)

“Barton Dawes’ unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. Highway construction puts him out of work and simultaneously forces him out of his home. Dawes isn’t the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His single-minded determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his once comfortable life.”

Like a lot of Stephen King’s work, Roadwork (released under Richard Bachman name) takes another ordinary person and shows us how the universe can really screw up what you thought was a good life. And Dawes had a semi-charmed life until things happened. And while he was able to somewhat recover from his wife’s miscarriage, but the death of their second child from a brain tumor began his slow descent into madness. But that’s not really an apt description, though. In the introduction, King writes about Barton coping with the death of Charlie (an interesting flip on how a husband and wife cope with the loss) and uses the death of his own mother to some answers to the conundrum of human pain: "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.”

Still, Barton seemed unsympathetic at the start, almost selfish, and, at times, a boorish loser. You get the sense, at first, this was a man who was finally pushed to his limit and decided to make those who (somehow) screwed up his life pay the price. But the book does surprise me because what does happen, at the end, is rather anticlimactic. While I think Roadwork (the third of five novels King released before being outed as Bachman), much like Thinner, could’ve been a short story or even a novella, it works better for me than Thinner. I don’t know, perhaps it’s my state of mind of late, my feelings of inadequacy and the sense that I have not lived a life of even semi-success. Dawes is a bit of a depressive, as I am. So in some ways, I felt for him. I understood him, somewhat.

I still three other “Bachman” books to read (and a few King books as well, as I’ve skipped and hopped over some is books over the decades (like The Tommyknockers). I will try and get through them over the coming months, but how much I plow through will always depend on factors.

Until next time…