His Life Lay in the Path of the Wrecking Ball

Between ’Salem’s Lot and The Shining, Stephen King wrote a novel called Roadwork. This book is about a regular guy, Barton Dawes, who can’t cope with misfortune and the changes life brings, and so he decides to take it out on the local highway authority. He barricades himself in his house, the one slated for demolition, with a cache of nasty weapons, alcohol and thermonuclear ’tude, shouting into his megaphone epithets like “Fucksticks!” Sorry, no Vogon constructor fleet. Back when I read a lot of King, this novel was the one I liked the least. I already knew from the cover and the blurb what was going to happen, but it took forever to get to the third act showdown, with only weird Maine swearing and a meagre crescendo of small-town violence to tide me over. Also Barton seemed like kind of a fuckstick himself, not getting over anything and hanging around until he went crazy enough to do something that could be a premise for a novel.

But dear readers, today I can honestly say that I just didn’t get this book until now. I was bone-ignorant of how months and months of constant roadwork on your street can send you off the deep end—the one you were scared to swim in. I failed to appreciate how endless filling, jackhammering, paving, grading, grinding, backhoeing, compacting and gravelling would jeopardize my sanity. They started in October. It’s now April. Take a second and count the months between. Check out that picture taken from my window. Their approach is to dig up a hole, then fill it up, then dig it up, then leave it unfilled for as long as possible, then repeat. I asked the workers how much longer, but they’re all from rural Quebec and I couldn’t understand shit. But let’s hand it to them, they’ve done it. They’ve changed my tastes enough to make me admire Stephen King’s Roadwork, a novel no one who isn’t a bored 12 year-old boy should ever attempt to read.

Open parenthesis. Roadwork was, like The Running Man, one of King’s pseudonymous Bachman books. Kingophiles have various explanations for why he did it, that the Bachman books were too commercial, or too experimental, or too short, or just plain too crappy. The man himself says it had nothing to do with the content of the books; it was just a publisher’s suggestion that the public wouldn’t cope with such prolificness under a single name. Coming from most writers that would sound like self-serving horseshit. But when he’s talking about himself, King’s probably guileless enough to be speaking his mind when he suggests that creating a secret identity was a good alternative to writing fewer books and spending more time with his family.

Recently, I read King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This is the first book he wrote after his much-publicized brush with mechanized death in 1999. It’s part autobiography and part treatise on the art of fiction. The parts about his young life reveal his very humble origins, and his obsession from the beginning with genre movies and the pulps. He seems to have spent the first 18 years of his life absorbing all things horror, sci-fi and fantasy, from Poe to sixties exploitation movies. It’s amusing to read about King getting brow-beaten by his pompous high school English teacher, a cultural interrogator who asks with mock calmness why anyone would read “trash like that” (when, presumably, there’s a shelf of linen-bound Melville and Dickens in the school library). King’s deft characterization of a familiar type is good fun, and a slam dunk for us underdogs who can enjoy a story for its own sake without spasticating over cultural seriousness. But King must know that, like his own lower-middle class shoulder-chip to hit the big time, that English teacher never really went away. He was a minor sucker on the tiniest tentacle of the octopus of consensus. Now it’s Stephen King who unashamedly writes “trash like that,” and younger generations get to play the shame game with his—and Danielle Steele’s and James Patterson’s and Dan Brown’s—books.

Personally, I can remember the exact day when I was first so shamed. At the age of fourteen or so I gave my father a Stephen King novel—The Dark Half, I think—for his birthday. He looked at me as if I’d delivered Freud’s gift of shit. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he mentioned James Joyce and made it clear that I’d erred royally by thinking he would give over a few hours to such drivel. I felt really awful, like there was something wrong with me for liking those books, and that if I kept it up I’d never be smart like dad.

But this was no rogue father! He was articulating the undying prejudice that stocks literature and genre on different shelves. The other day I came across noted critic and lunatic Harold Bloom’s comments on King winning the O. Henry short story prize: “He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they [the selection committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.” Notice how Bloom revives the binomial penny dreadful, hearkening back to a time when writers knew both how much one of their lines was worth and what its value was. The ham-fisted use of the word idiocy to round it all off recalls Pacino’s speech to the fingers-up-their-asses school board in Scent of a Woman: “If I was half the critic I used to be, I’d take a flame thrower to King’s house!”

The point isn’t that King has won. He hasn’t—this is more a background tension than a war. Academia and publishing must judge books, and this leads to canon formation and snobbery. Most who set out to write penny dreadfuls will fail and give up, but for every 10,000 who try, we’ll have a Stephen King who can laugh it all away. For example, Michael Chabon, a more talented and more ambitious writer than King, has said that he sees his mission as “the destruction of literary categories.” Fair enough, but his clever pastiches depend on the reader’s knowledge of those categories. Kavalier and Clay wouldn’t be as good of a novel without the existence and genuine attractions of comics, graphic novels and pulp fiction as alternatives to assigned reading.

The other day I was mulling over the idea of going forth into Carrie or The Shining, with a good Sun hat and a compass and plenty of water, in the hopes of mapping out new oases. But I decided that for me this would be an act of radical nostalgia and nothing more. I still think fondly of the King books I read when I could enjoy them. Even Roadwork, now. Close parenthesis. “Now they would listen to him—now he had the guns.” Aw yeah.