Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners - Softcover

Rockville Pike's narrator, Jane Kramer, wakes up one day to the harsh realization that she is the suburban mom of a Goth teenager; the unhappy wife to Leon, her unhappy, overweight husband; an employee at Kramer's Discount Furniture Store, the failing family business that sells cheap, ugly furniture on the over-developed Rockville Pike. As if that isn't enough, she's in debt, the business is being sued by the local preservation society for tearing down a possibly historic barn, her son has been suspended from school, and a mysterious patio furniture buyer named Delia has Leon under her spell.

Jane takes refuge at the graves of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, which sit nine lanes of traffic from the furniture store, in a graveyard that "appeared to be a traffic island, with water-stained tombstones dropped at the intersection of two wildly busy thoroughfares." Jane's kinship to the Fitzgeralds often feels tenuous, despite her being a drop-out from a graduate school literature program. However, the irony of them landing here is not lost on Jane or the reader. When Jane says "I couldn't help but wonder what Scott and Zelda would make of their current surroundings," she is really trying to make sense of her own life. She thought she would be on Rockville Pike temporarily while her high-yield, bond-trader MBA husband helped his family out after his father's heart attack. Seventeen years later, here she still is.

Although Delia wants Jane to come up with a line of patio furniture based on the aura of the Fitzgeralds, salvation arrives in the even more surprising form of Soccer Mom Extraordinaire Tiffany Fleisher. For those readers who have not yet learned that "scrapbook" has become a verb -- or that it is a multimillion-dollar industry -- Tiffany's job as a memory consultant for Memories, Inc., "the U.S. leader in memory technology for more than ten years," may seem more like farce than social commentary. But, indeed, scrapbooking is all too real.

"Bring five to seven family photographs," Tiffany advises. "Pick a theme and bring your checkbook." For $20, Jane can participate in a workshop where she can keep writing checks for supplies. These include "gadgets to round edges of photos, turn rectangles into ovals, eliminate superfluous objects, and get rid of strangers lurking in the background," and a dizzying array of scissors and pens and stickers and borders. With her life falling apart, Jane wants them all, as if creating a perfect scrapbook page will help her to create a perfect life. When she realizes that she can actually cut out a picture of her husband and impose it onto one of Justin's soccer games, which he never attended, Jane sees the possibility of fixing everything that is wrong in her life.

Coll is at her best when she sticks to satirizing suburban manners, its everyday rituals and routines. Jane, the perpetual outsider, serves as a witty and intelligent tour guide through this world: "Each week they would spread their blankets side by side and produce thermoses of coffee. . . . I would join them sometimes as a sort of social experiment. . . . No one was ever rude, but then, no one offered me a swig of coffee, either."

Jane is a sympathetic character, the mom who wears old jeans to soccer games and sweatpants when she drops her son off at school, trapped in a world filled with mothers in navy blue suits, toting Coach briefcases on their way to important jobs, or dressed "not for a soccer game, but for a fox hunt, one on a grand country estate where they would drive their SUVs on rugged back roads. . . ." The reader can't help but root for Jane, to want her out of debt, her son out of trouble, her husband to fall in love with her all over again, and harmony to find its way somehow into her life.

Jane is Every Woman. She longs to look like the model in the catalogue that drops through her mail slot; she longs for satisfaction and happiness. Every time she takes a mis-step -- like when she shows up in a bridesmaid's dress to a black-tie dinner with the wrong shade of lipstick that she pilfered from Delia's purse smeared across her lips -- readers will identify with her even more.

But at times, particularly as the novel struggles toward a climax, Coll tries too hard. Twists and turns of plot in the guise of the stock situations inherent in traditional comedies of manners -- missed communications, misunderstandings, deceit and trickery -- take over. Coll ultimately sacrifices depth of character and emotional development, perhaps to stay true to the form. When balance does begin to show itself in Jane's life, we feel more disappointed than gratified.

Still, there are few books that have readers laughing out loud the way this one does. It is our own world that Coll shows us, so that even as we laugh with Jane Kramer about what she sees, we also laugh at ourselves. Rockville Pike takes what Jane calls "a crisis of normal life," and lends "a mild literary air to my otherwise mundane collapse in the suburbs."

Reviewed by Ann Hood
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.