Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners [Hardcover]

Susan Coll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 21, 2004

Jane Kramer never imagined a life selling discount furniture and commuting between grocery stores and soccer fields via minivan. But when her father-in-law has a heart attack, she and her husband, Leon, trade in their glamorous New York life for a stint running the family business on Rockville Pike, a tributary of the suburban sprawl line extending outward from Washington, D.C. Kramer's Discount Furniture Depot sits away from several lanes of traffic, near the tombstone of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is here that Jane escapes each day at lunchtime to ponder her confusing turn in life.

At age forty-one, she has a teenage Goth son, her husband is increasingly overweight and quick-tempered, and their business is in a state of crisis, both financially and legally. Jane finds herself wishing for something more. First, add to the mix Delia, a mysterious and strangely predatory patio-furniture saleswoman who seems to have her sights set on Leon, and then an attack on the store expansion plans by historic preservationists. When potentially disturbing findings about Delia's past come to light, Jane finds herself learning that, despite life's reversals, it is possible to reinvent herself by tapping into talents and desires she didn't realize she still had.

Rockville Pike is a smart, witty, and funny read that revels in the joy of discovering what life has in store.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coll (karlmarx.com) considers one woman's stalled life and the midlife crisis it provokes in her funny, poignant second novel. In über-suburban Rockville Pike, Md., 41-year-old Jane Kramer is stuck running Kramer's Discount Furniture Depot, raising her teenage goth son, Justin, virtually alone and obsessing over Delia, the patio furniture saleswoman who's vying for her husband Leon's attentions. Highlights, for Jane, are her daily visits to the grave sites of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, her creative shopping sprees, and her discovery of Memories Inc., a pyramid scheme that thrives on the scrapbooking obsessions of housewives. All's semiwell, at least, until Leon runs off with Delia, Justin gets suspended from school and Jane realizes that they are living way beyond their means. Pushed to the breaking point, Jane thinks of her mother, a suicide: "Another reason why I couldn't drive my van off a cliff was because there was a load of wet towels in the washer and who would ever think to stick them in the dryer?" Propelling herself out of her inertia, Jane decides to track down her misbehaving family, and soon she finds herself back in New York, where she first met Leon, mourning the life she never lived and determined to fix the life she never planned. Coll perfectly captures Jane's coming of a certain age with feisty humor and soul-searching honesty.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Like Coll's first novel, karlmarx.com (2001), her new one features a heroine whose life is teetering just outside her control. Jane Kramer studied literature in college and had high hopes for a glamorous life in New York City; but at 41, she finds herself stuck exactly where she never thought she'd be: discontented, deep in debt, and helping to run her father-in-law's failing discount furniture store in the suburbs. Frequent fights with her husband (who may or may not be having an affair with a glamorous patio-furniture rep), worry over her teenage son's Goth tendencies, and the well-publicized discovery of human bones behind the store drive Jane to seek solace across Rockville Pike at the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and (less successfully) by becoming a scrapbook-supply saleswoman for Memories, Inc., a firm that seems suspiciously like a pyramid scheme. Coll deftly satirizes suburbia without sacrificing warmth for humor, and her wry and wistful heroine will resonate with readers who find themselves living in the world of minivans and soccer moms without knowing quite how they got there. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (December 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074324477X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743244770
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,424,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susan Coll is the author of four novels. Acceptance, a satire of the college admissions process, was made into a 2009 television movie starring Joan Cusack and Mae Whitman. Her work has appeared in publications including the International Herald Tribune, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She lives with her husband in Washington DC and New York, and is the mother of three children----and she's a three-time Beach Week survivor.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun on the Pike!, March 24, 2005

By 

M. T. Guzman "squeakychu" (Rockville, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners (Hardcover)

Angst-ridden and unhappily married Jane Kramer helps her husband Leon run his family's discount furniture store on Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland. Coping is difficult for Jane as she tries at the same time to keep an eye on Delia (a store employee to whom she suspects her husband is attracted), supervise her 16-year-old Goth son who was just suspended from school, and assist fellow soccer-mom Tiffany in running a scrapbooking business.

At the same time, a mystery ensues. Money is disappearing from the store's funds. Who could possibly be taking it? It's not as simple as it sounds.

How Jane deals with all of these problems makes for one hilarious read. The author's hard-hitting, sarcastic humor is timed just right to provide a truly laugh-out loud reading experience.

I absolutely loved the Rockville setting since this city is my hometown. The author did a fantastic job of bringing some true-to-life local color into this story. She used not only the quirky character of the city but also references to F. Scott Fitzgerald who is buried here in Rockville.

Rockville Pike is a fun story with very interesting characters, many of whom you'll be sure not to forget. This is an excellent novel for everyone. No, you do not need to live near Rockville Pike to really enjoy it. I highly recommend it for everyone who likes to laugh.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!, February 20, 2006

By 

Momoftwosons (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners (Hardcover)

This is a very nice book -- Except, WAIT -- I think it is about MY LIFE! Ha.

I guess I could really relate to the dismal, suburban setting and the odd suburban characters. I loved the Goth son and his rich friend. The husband was, well, in many ways, pretty typical! Janie manages to rally, but you can see why it wasn't easy for her.

If you are wondering how you ended up in suburbia you'll be able to relate to Janie too.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars She really captures life on the Pike., February 17, 2005

By 

Diane K. Danielson "Principal Consultant, DKD... (Cohasset, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners (Hardcover)

If you're looking for some light reading for vacation, it's a decent read. And maybe I'm jaded because I read all these great reviews and just expected a bit more. If you're in the market for a good story with compelling characters, however, you might want to look elsewhere. Yet, if you have ever spent any time living or working around Rockville Pike (as I have) the book is a must read. Loved the detailed descriptions of the area, right down to the group mailboxes (they are such a Maryland thing). There is a lot of promise here, and I just wish that the writer would have either completely dropped some of the distracting, almost unrelated, side story lines or done the opposite and better developed the supporting characters who just seemed to be mentioned haphazardly.