Joseph Boone 2007-12-23
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Barton George Dawes has sunk deep roots. He's worked at the same commercial laundry plant for 20 years, and lived in the same house for nearly as long. But the city has plans to extend a highway that will force the destruction of both places. Dawes has apparently been losing his grip on sanity for the past three years when his young son died of brain cancer. George buys a high-powered rifle as well as a .44 magnum handgun. He manipulates things at work so that the company ends up with nowhere to relocate to when the plant is demolished and gets fired. He starts thinking about buying explosives to destroy the highway and the equipment used to build it. I'm not going to give away any more of the plot, but when a story begins with a man purchasing guns while having two separate voices holding an argument in his head, you might guess that it doesn't end with him sipping Mai Tais on the patio of a beachfront condo in Florida.
Roadwork may be narrated in the third person, but the perspective is solely from Dawes. Readers must endure his rambling rants about virtually every aspect of life and soliloquies covering all manner of topics. If Dawes were eloquent or funny, this might be entertaining. But he's a confused, lonely, hurt man who doesn't understand why he is doing what he's doing and offers no real insight on anything. The only thing you learn from Dawes is that he's angry, and it didn't take 300 pages for that point to hit home. It's surprising that Stephen King, the master of creating compelling characters has managed to write a novel built around a single character that is neither likeable nor interesting.
Alienation from modern society is felt by many of us to varying degrees, and a book showing these feelings taken to the extreme has the potential to entertain and enlighten. Unfortunately, Roadwork has missed the mark badly on both counts. My suspicion is that this might have made a great novella of 100 pages or so but there are too many scenes of Dawes yelling at people and then saying "I don't know" when they ask him what's wrong or what he wants to do. There's no sense of tension building as his march to the inevitable occurs, just one more day of confusion and despair in what feels like an endless series of them.
Roadwork has a few strong moments such as the last ten pages. But this is not a book that could remotely be described as a page-turner or compelling. King wrote some great novels at this point in his career, but he missed the mark with this one. I wouldn't recommend it to most readers. King fans will do better to look at almost any of his other books before trying this one. Perhaps people who loved the movie Falling Down will find something worthwhile here, since it has similar themes and might entertain similar audiences.
