In 'Why I Was Bachman' Stephen King
acknowledges that Roadwork was his first real attempt to do 'a straight
novel'. It was written in the period between Salem's Lot and The
Shining when Kings makes it clear "I was young enough in those days to
worry about that casual cocktail-party question: 'Yes but when are you going to
do something serious?" He also admits it was in part to make sense
of his mother's death by cancer the previous year that he says: "I was
left grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all."
For that reason he thinks Roadwork is
the worst of the lot because it's trying too hard and to find some answers to
the conundrum of human pain. (King had no idea in 1985 just how much film and
TV would end up dealing with this subject in the 21st century or for
that matter how much he would end up dealing with in a more genre type vein in
his own novels in the decades to come.)
You can debate whether King ever tried
to right a 'straight novel' after Roadwork. There's certainly some work
of his in the early 1990s such as Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne
that basically that basically have no real supernatural elements to them
and certainly most of his best novellas in Different Seasons and later
on would have no real supernatural elements to them. What I do know is that Roadwork
is a better book that King thinks it is and that's almost certainly due to
setting as much as anything else.
Roadwork is the only Bachman novel that has
something resembling a timestamp. Every chapter is a date from November 20,
1973 to January 20, 1974. The book has the subtitle 'A Novel of the First
Energy Crisis' and takes place at the center of the oil embargo that was part
of Nixon's policy towards the Middle East. It takes place just as the unparalleled
economic growth that's existed since the New Deal has come to an end and the
record inflation that would become the feature of the seventies isn't even
close to becoming as bad as it will become. The Vietnam War is nearing its end
as is Nixon's Presidency. All of this is essentially background noise to its
main character/
In August of 1972 a young reporter is
covering the mayor and governor in a groundbreaking ceremony. He interviews a man
in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves who makes it clear the groundbreaking
of a highway is a piece of shit. That's cut from the story automatically
That man is Bart Dawes who lives in an unnamed city and
state (it's possible it's Wisconsin but King never gives it away) At the start
of the book Bart is dealing with the fact that he has to move out of his house
which is right in the line of where the title roadwork is going to take place.
His neighborhood has agreed to take the buyouts and has relocated to other towns
where their business take them. He and his wife Mary are the last family still
there. His wife has accepted this reality. He hasn't.
Bart is the manager of the Blue Ribbon
Laundromat which is being taken over by a corporation and has to relocate. The
store has an option to buy a Thom McCan in Waterford on November 26th
when the book begins but Bart has been unwilling to pull the trigger even while
the 784 extension is being built. Bart's one of the few people who's still part
of the old ownership under the Tarkington family who put him through college.
Bart Dawes is very much the model of the kind of guy whose lost in the past
both in terms of work and family. When he tries to explain what is so good
about his old bosses to an underling even he admits he's lost the thread by the
end of it. There is a logical reason for it – the new site is going to require
at least a quarter of a million in renovations before it even turns out a clean
sheet – but all of that is very much based on Bart's own word and his contempt
for boss. Bart seems so bent on self-destruction he doesn't seem to realize
he's going to destroy the entire company he spent his life working for.
I don't know if the term 'midlife
crisis' existed when King wrote Roadwork but you could make an argument Bart
is just having a very bad one. He even has a good reason. Three and a half
years ago his son Charlie was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor:
Somewhere…deep in Charlie's brain was
a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that
collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squash them
with one hard hit. But they weren't on the table. They were deep in the meat of
Charlie's mind, still smugly growing…
Within months Charlie is dead. Bart
admits he never cried, while his wife cried immensely. It has essentially left
their marriage a shell of itself and turned her into someone who drinks, though
not as much as Bart and it takes away a lot of who she is. But eventually she
is the one who heals, albeit within what a 1970s woman who has not embraced
feminism is allowed to do. He has been robbed of all the things father's do
with their sons and he can't get over it:
And if a collection of bad cells no bigger
than a walnut could destroy all these things…what did that leave? How could you
ever trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful then a Saturday
night demolition derby?
All of it was inside him, but he had
been honestly unaware that his thoughts were changing him so deeply, so irretrievably…and
if the world was only a demo derby, wouldn't one ne justified in stepping out
of his car? But what after that? Life seemed only a preparation for hell."
Bart does have outlets; indeed his
wife suggests multiple times he see a therapist. And its certainly clear even
to Bart that he has lost his reason even when the novel begins in earnest:
He kept doing things without letting
himself think about them. Safer that way. It was like having a circuit breaker
in his head, and it thumped into place every time part of him tried to ask But
why are you doing this? Part of his mind would go dark.
He does this when he walks to a gun
store and just decides to buy two rifles with his credit card and lie about it.
He does it when he lies to his wife over and over about going to see a new
house. He lies about it to his bosses and to his employees. And at the start of
the novel all of those lies catch up with him when he loses first his job, and
then his marriage on the same day. His wife takes it the hardest, thinking
she's blaming him for everything. Even then he doesn't have an explanation and
he doesn't think he owes anyone.
Much of Bart's rebellion is pathetic.
He drives on the freeway, frequently drunk and keeps the thermostat high in
violation of the energy crisis. Eventually it becomes more dangerous with him
deciding to blow up a highway installation with gasoline cans on Christmas Eve
and seeing a gangster named Sal Magliore who wants to buy explosives. It's
telling that the mobster's first reaction is that he thinks Dawes is a
fruitcake. "This is a game to you. Crazy but still a game." And Magliore
is correct Dawes increasingly seems to enjoy being against 'the man' even
though his rebellion is far more pathetic then those who chose to march on
Washington and burn their draft cards."
That's clear with Olivia, a hitchhiker
he meets in her early 20s and tries to explain himself to in what he refers to
as 'The Trained Dog Ethic:
…explains such mysteries as the monetary
crisis, inflation, the Vietnam War and the current energy crisis. Let us take
the energy crisis as an example. The American people are trained dogs, trained
in this case to love oil guzzling toys…In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be
trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training
makes them wag their tails…I don't object to saving energy. I object to training.
Like Pavlov's dogs…we've been trained
to salivate when somebody shows us as a bombardier skidoo with overdrive or a
Zenith Color TV with a motorized antenna…It isn't the Trained Dog Ethic I
object to anyway. It's the fact that the masters are mental, moral and spiritual
idiots."
Olivia, who is very much the model of
the college protestor, has to have heard this before and her reaction is
"You're just trying to soothe your conscience with a lot of rhetoric."
When he shows her the highway that has wrecked his life her reaction is to
shrug: "It's roadwork, so what?"
Still she does have some perspective
and can put it better than Bart does:
I started to think of the last 15
years or so as some kind of grotesque Monopoly game. Francis Gary Powers gets
shot down in his U-2. Lost one turn. N----ers dispersed by fire hoses in Selma.
Freedom riders shot gunned in Mississippi, marches rallies, Kennedy getting blown
up in Dallas, Vietnam, more marches, Kent State, student strikes, women's
liberation, and all for what? So a bunch of heads can sit around stoned in a
crummy apartment watching Bob Hope?
Olivia has looked at America and has
decided that the best thing she can do is try to get her life together. She's
decided to get a job and try to move forward. Bart decides to keep paying her
money, first from his life insurance and then for his sale of the house. But as
with Magliore she has a clear idea that he's a fruitcake himself and his interest
is all about himself.
Roadwork does make it clear that Bart is
dealing with forces that don't have his best interests: late in the novel it's
clear that the city has been tapping his phones, may be engaging in surveillance
and that in fact there is a darker reason behind why the city is building (though
in keeping with Bachman's work in general Dawes has no idea of it at the time.)
And it makes clear that everything Dawes ends up doing is meaningless in the
grand scheme of things; even when the truth comes out it doesn't nothing to
stop the moves of progress.
However Bachman/King is very clear
that none of this excuses any of Bart's actions and not even he can accept it.
At the climax of the novel there's a period called 'stop time which is
basically a Joycean type sentence which is coherent. It reveals that not even Bart
realized how far this would go that demonstrates the duality of his mind as
well as how crazy he's actually gone.
When he talks with the press even the
reporter who will end up becoming a Pulitzer winner because of it makes it very
clear how lost he is: "I'll see your side gets told."
Bart just says: "I have no side.
That's why I am doing this."
Late in the novel Bart seems to have
realized that remind us very much of the journeys we'll see characters like
Walter White and Jimmy McGill take in this century
He had done things he had never done
before…Deep emotions had been excavated from his dry, middle echelon
executive's soul like the effect of a dark religion on an archeological dig. He
knew what it is what like to be ALIVE.
Then after recounting his sins:
But even those things, as bad as they
had been, had been new and exciting, like the thought that he might be insane
or going insane. The tracks through the interior landscape he had been
strolling (or crawling?) through these last two months were the only tracks. He
had explored himself and if what he had been finding was often banal, it was
also sometimes dreadful and beautiful.
It's at that point he briefly thinks
of getting out, finally going somewhere else, maybe with Olivia, maybe on his
own. He admits he can't remember Charlie's face anymore, denying what even he
believes his stand has been about. At one point Mary actually tells him:
"What good are you doing yourself thinking about Charlie all the time? It's
eating you up. You're his prisoner."
At that point Bart says his last words
to his wife. "You knew it was time to leave him and so you did. I wish I
could be that instinctive."
It's clear throughout the novel that Bart
is trying to find a way to kill himself rather than fix himself and face his
fears. He knows this is a mortal sin and is told so twice late in the novel,
one by an expected source, one by an unexpected one. In a very real sense he
spends the entire novel destroying everything he has ever held dear and what
happens at the end of the book is just the biggest way to do so.
All of the novels in The Bachman
Books end with the lead character either killing himself or going insane
and considering that Bart Dawes is pretty much crazy at the start of Roadwork
the ending is inevitable. One might want to read into Dawes the pattern of
so many assassins and American born terrorists we've had in the over forty
years since Roadwork came out but Bachman bears no more responsibility for
that then for any school shootings that came in the aftermath of Rage. One of Bart's last thoughts is that there
is no good place to make your stand in this world and he might hate that he
becomes a symbol of sorts after it. Bart
Dawes isn't a rebel without a cause, not just because he doesn't have a cause
but he's not really a rebel. He's just a guy for whom tragedy led to the worst
kind of midlife crisis and rather than try to find a way through he decided to
make sure 'midlife' was all the life he got.
What a sad, lonely man. If he'd just lived a
little longer he'd have seen Nixon resign. If that wasn't something to live
for, I don't know what was.
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