English

Noun

1. The construction or maintenance done to roads.

   The traffic jam was caused by roadwork being done during rush hour.

2. Exercise such as running and jogging done on the roads.

   The athlete needed to get home early to do his roadwork before it got too dark to be safe.

This article is about a Stephen King novel. For the Edgar Winter album, see Roadwork (album).

Roadwork is a novel by Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

The story takes place in an unnamed city in the 1970s. Barton George Dawes, grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, is driven off the deep end when he finds that both his home and his business will be condemned and demolished to make way for a new interstate highway. The major theme is the transience of human existence, and the lack of permanence as a failing of a maturing society.

Plot synopsis

The novel starts with a "man on the street interview" where Barton, currently unknown, gives his acidic opinion of the extension to the highway. (He will meet with this reporter again at the end of the book, neither man recognizing the other.) Barton then begins, seemingly unaware of his own actions, to procure means to defend himself. As the book progresses, it is revealed that his son had succumbed to an inoperable brain tumor, and that Barton is unable (or unwilling) to sever the emotional tie between the memory of his son and the house that he grew up in. His wife is aware of the order to demolish their house and cannot understand why he is unwilling to finalize the sale, and eventually leaves him. He quits his job after making some disastrous decisions involving the purchase of a new facility for the laundry business he works for. He begins a working relationship with an auto dealer with ties to the Mob, and through him purchases explosives and the use of his services to sweep his house for listening devices. He even launches an attack on the construction equipment that will be used to raze his home and build the highway, using Molotov cocktails to burn the machines. Throughout the novel, he systematically severs ties with all connections to the community, until the last day runs out, and his house is scheduled for demolition.

When the police come to escort him from the house, he fires on them with a rifle loaded with .460 Weatherby Magnum cartridges, damaging a police car and attracting the attention of the media. He agrees to leave the house after a reporter is allowed to enter the house and speak to him. After the reporter leaves, Barton tosses out his guns and sets off explosives he has bought, destroying the house with him inside it.

The epilogue describes what happens in the aftermath - some secrets are revealed about the extension, about the city's attempt to try and cheat Barton's widowed wife out of the money she got from the sale of the house, about the fact that there was no real reason for the extension--the city would lose budget money for transportation projects if they did not spend it on projects like the extension.

The author's opinion

In the introduction to the first collected works The Bachman Books, King stated in his essay "Why I Was Bachman": "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... Roadwork tries so hard to be good and find some answers to the conundrum of human pain." King also described his disappointment with the work, and stated that he was in two minds about reprinting it but decided to in the end in order to give readers an insight into his personality at the time.

In a much later introduction to the second edition of the Bachman books, "The Importance of Being Bachman" King stated that he had changed his mind and that it had become his favorite of the books.