‘You can’t always understand something just because you did it...’
Stephen King has to date published 66 novels. I have read 42 of them. While they obviously vary in quality, I always find something to enjoy in them to make the experience worthwhile. Alas, Roadwork, King’s third published novel under the Richard Bachman pseudonym (after Rage and The Long Walk), is almost entirely without merit…
Roadwork was written by King as a way to process the death of his mother around the same time that his first novel, Carrie, was published. Indeed, King offered up this piece of shit and Salem’s Lot to his publisher as the follow-up to Carrie, and they wisely went with the far superior work. It’s interesting to consider how different his career could have been had they gone the other way.
Roadwork is the story of a man named Barton George Dawes and his anger at the building of a highway extension project that will force him to move house and relocate the laundry in which he works. What follows is one man’s descent into madness and insanity. The problem is that Dawes is neither sympathetic nor particularly interesting.
As with any King novel, there are still transcendent passages here, and the character of old school mob boss Salvatore Magliore is a delight, but the female characters are particularly thinly drawn, and King, a young man himself when he wrote this, doesn’t seem to have a handle on what life is like for an older man. It’s difficult to conjure up an image of Barton George Dawes because King himself doesn’t seem to know who he is. Throw in some pretty egregious racism, even for the time, and Roadwork is a pretty unpleasant novel. I’ve found this with all the Bachman books I have read, though it has to be said. Both The Running Man and The Load Walk are relentlessly grim and misanthropic. The latter is the only one of the three in which this tone of hopelessness works.
Roadwork is a mercifully short novel, and its quality is perhaps indicative of the fact that I am now making my way through all the King novels that I didn’t want to read the first time around. Luckily, I’m sure there are still some gems to be unearthed elsewhere.