Sun City by Tove Jansson. NYRB Classics, 224 pages. 2025.
The first thing you notice is what isn’t there. Retirement homes and communities, as their euphemistic name implies, are premised on the denial of certain realities. Early in Sun City, Tove Jansson’s 1974 novel about one such place in St. Petersburg, Florida, she writes that you’ll “meet no children and no hippies and no dogs” in the surrounding area. Nor, once inside the Berkeley Arms, which most of the characters call home, will you see the grisly reality of aging. Jansson writes that “no one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens.” The two-story building’s veranda has eight rocking chairs facing outward—the ocean view is interrupted by Bounty, a recreation of an eighteenth-century Royal Navy ship made for the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty—but mostly residents look down at their crafts or their books.
This quiet, quaint nature is part of what made St. Petersburg a “geriatric capital,” according to a 1962 Time article, when around 30 percent of its population was sixty-five or older. Fifty years on, it’s dwarfed in every way by its neighbor one hundred miles north, The Villages. Over 85 percent of the eighty thousand residents are eligible for an AARP membership and quaint, solitary tasks are not what draws them. Instead, as Lance Oppenheim shows in his 2020 documentary Some Kind of Heaven, residents spend their days traversing sprawling golf courses and dancing at bustling bars. As one interviewee says, The Villages has “everything you ever want.” But more striking than what’s changed is what’s stayed the same. Per a white man side-saddle on his golf cart in his garage: “I don’t see the slums. I don’t see death and destruction. I don’t see murders.”
Neither Some Kind of Heaven nor Sun City, out this year in English by long-time Jansson translator Thomas Teal, have much in the way of plot arcs, perhaps because their characters, real and imagined, haven’t got much in the way of arcs left and are trying to make the best of the time remaining. The emphasis for both Jansson and Oppenheim, then, is on the transformative impact of their subjects’ isolation. Jansson’s roving attention dishes on the unguarded thoughts of nearly every Berkeley Arms resident and several neighbors, while Oppenheim initially sticks to B-roll of contented seniors dancing and driving golf carts, before zeroing in on a handful of unusually unsettled Villagers for most of its run time. Reggie and Anne, who have been married almost fifty years, struggle to bridge the gap between Anne’s social life playing pickleball and avid meditator Reggie, who is constantly high, and eventually gets arrested for, in his words, “five dollars worth of cocaine, which, obviously, I forgot.” On a more melancholy end of the spectrum is Barbara, a widow who, despite arriving at “God’s waiting room for heaven,” finds herself stuck between stations. Her husband passed away shortly after they moved in, and without enough money to stay or move back to Massachusetts, she has to continue working, attending an acting class and mini-golfing with self-proclaimed “Margarita Man” Lynn. The camera always finds her stone-faced and searching. Oppenheim’s subjects retreat easily to their homes, siloed even from their like-minded neighbors, while the folks at the Berkeley Arms have no such option, their individual rooms still fundamentally permeable.
Sun City hasn’t much in the way of plot arcs, perhaps because its characters haven’t got much in the way of arcs left and are trying to make the best of the time remaining.
How one makes meaning near the end of their life is not a new question for Jansson. Though she’s best known for her children’s series Moomin, some of her best work is centered on the stories of older people. The Summer Book, originally published in 1972, beautifully renders a few months a grandmother and granddaughter spend together on an island grieving their daughter and mother, respectively. In her 1982 novel The True Deceiver, a younger woman sees a lonely older illustrator as an easy mark for a con and gets more than she bargained for. The beauty of these books, mostly set in Finland or in unnamed Finland-seeming places, comes from the way characters separated in age by decades navigate the friction created by their differences. But Sun City is structured around that beauty’s absence. Though the novel has more characters living in closer proximity than in much of her other work, a gloomy loneliness hangs over every page. The novel approaches each character with open-hearted curiosity. Their histories—what family they have left, where they were before Florida—occasionally slither into their present, but Jansson’s interest is less on what led them to this semi-quarantined zone than how they spend their semi-quarantined time.
Mostly, they complain about each other. Comes with the territory! Miss Ruthermer-Berkely, the nonagenarian proprietor of the Berkeley Arms, embraces her difficult clientele:
She wanted to defend the irrational surplus acquired in the course of a long life. She considered it a natural product of experience, and thus perfectly explicable and no cause for alarm. There were many people whose job it was to explain. For her, all that mattered was this: Our guests live here and have a right to expect protection. Outside of St. Petersburg there are all sorts of evil madness running wild, and we can’t help that. But I have built a house over the kind of madness that is innocent, and it will be allowed to persist in peace for as long as I live.
Ruthermer-Berkeley’s opposite number is Richard Schwartz, the surviving son of Villages founder Harold Schwartz and a current executive. “They’re living their American dream, as are we,” he says. “Bring the baby boomers to a home that they were familiar with when they were young.” New buildings are decorated with false “Established 1792” signs and plaques detail further fake histories and artificially faded saddle-seller ads cooked up by a design firm enhance the illusion. There’s a gate that separates it from the outside world, even though, as the vest-clad woman waving cars through explains, “these are all public roads. . . . They are all free to come as they like.”
The porousness of those gates is embodied by Dennis, an eighty-three-year-old fuccboi. His live-in van is often parked nearby. In his own words, he’s “kind of, like, a fugitive from California,” where he’s wanted for driving under the influence. Security attempts to keep him at bay, but their only tool is an amorphous threat. He’s down on his luck but motivated to find a “nice-looking lady with some money that looks good that I’d be not embarrassed to be seen on the street with,” though, like Flannery O’Connor’s good man, she has been hard to find. When he does find a woman who takes him in, it feels shaky. On the phone with his mom, smoking a cigar he lit with a grill lighter, he reassures her that he’s still working. “I’m doing some handyman work. And I’m doing some show business stuff and DJ stuff.” And while The Villages is perhaps the world’s most welcoming environment for octogenarian DJs, Dennis is too full an embodiment of the pervasive Peter Pan syndrome among the population and accommodating him feels like it’ll burst the bubble.
The difficulty of maintaining its mirage, and the consequences of failing to do so, is a major concern of The Villages. The Villages Daily Sun is one of the few thriving newspapers in America. It’s got the twenty-third highest print circulation and is powered by its robust print advertising revenue. According to Craig Pittman’s 2016 book Oh, Florida!, staff were instructed never to say “anything complimentary about President Barack Obama” and not to report on the “numerous sinkholes that open up because of all the water being pumped from the aquifer to keep lawns and golf courses green.” Oppenheim dots his film with shots of residents reading the Daily Sun, listening to oldies on WVLG 640 AM, or watching Villages News Network TV—all owned by Villages Media Group.
The residents of The Berkeley Arms don’t have the luxury of a coddling media machine or access to the litany of summer camp-like activities; when they want special entertainment, they’ve got to bring the outside world in. For an event with other retirement homes in the area, they hire a boys choir. But muscles you never use grow weak, and the residents are unsettled by the choir’s youth. “They were moving very slowly, as if in an incantation or a rite.” Hypnotized, one attendee “got the idea that they were harbingers of death, that they were like death itself, relentless, incomprehensible, and beautiful, and she shared her insight . . . ‘Death is young,’ she said. ‘He is very young.’”
Between seismic moments are smaller flare-ups, from which much of the novel’s humor and pleasure flows. An early conflict concerns Mr. Thompson, who allegedly “pretended to be deaf” and overhears two other residents laughing. Not having heard the joke, he asks to be clued in. After several polite refusals, he yells at one of the women: “A person never gets to hear anything funny! A person might as well be dead! Dead as a doornail!” When he’s eventually told the joke—one woman implied that another could use a letter she’d received as toilet paper—he’s pacified. “Ladies, you are irresistibly hilarious.” In the early going, these outbursts recognized by fellow residents as bids at living out one’s days with a semblance of dignity. They fight about who does what or who sits where because so much else is beyond their control. Mr. Thompson’s rude bid for inclusion, for example, is softened by the knowledge that he strolls to the bar around the corner every afternoon. “It was said that he did this to show his disdain for those who ate lunch, but it may have been that he couldn’t afford both beer and lunch and so chose the one he preferred.”
Jansson’s elegant free indirect discourse portrays these sacrifices and resignations with a light touch. But Sun City is not a novel of nice-but-occasionally-prickly folks going gentle into that good night. Those who are less sanguine are most reminiscent of the elder characters from Jansson’s other novels: their disconnection frustrates them, but they lack the proximity or time to mend it. Rebecca Rubinstein, the teller of the aforementioned joke, is the least at peace with her lot, and the novel’s most acrid moments come when she lashes out. In the most haunting chapter, fed up with the mundane repetition of her son’s monthly letters detailing his life, she sits down to draft an honest reply:
My dreadful son. We are very like one another, although you did not inherit my intelligence in the broad sense of the word. In any event . . . you ought to have figured out that I detest platitudes more than silence . . . Have you no imagination? And if you do, what do you waste it on? . . . Never write because it is the day to write!
Unsure of how to communicate with her son, she resolves not to send the letter, choosing the silence she asked of her son. But her anger is likely not that her son’s life is boring, but that its meaning can never be conveyed to her in the medium of a monthly letter. The view through the keyhole view is too painful a reminder of what she’s missing.
Other characters struggle to make themselves understood. One late arrival, a former Broadway star named Tim Tellerton, takes a shot at leveling with Joe, a young man who rides his motorcycle in and out the story. Though he acknowledged that Joe “won’t accept or reject what I tell him, it will just be something an old man said,” he makes the effort. Joe, upset by Telletron’s comment that Joe owns his Honda motorcycle, snaps back, “You can’t own a Honda. Can you own 120 miles an hour? . . . You people own things a whole different way.” The argument is circular and futile but forces Tellerton to directly confront that while he still feels he has something to give, he’s been left behind. The simmering frustration with a too-short life boils over in the case of Mrs. Rubenstein, irritated by another woman’s statement about how peculiar people are: “Most people simply mess around. They absolutely dabble. They live out of habit . . . Have you achieved that state of perfect being that requires no evasions? Have you the courage to do nothing at all?”
Sun City and Some Kind of Heaven are both testaments to how elusive that state is. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the documentary’s most shocking sequence, Reggie’s appearance in court due to his cocaine possession. Obsessed with staying in control and doing things on his terms, he decides to represent himself. While arguing that his crime wasn’t very severe, he admits guilt. The judge repeatedly tries to cut him off and save him from himself. After exhausting all other avenues to quiet the defendant, the judge tells Reggie he is “the rudest person I’ve ever had in court . . . I have dealt with murderers, rapists, and everything else, they are much more respectful in court than you are.”
After a long life, a playground just for people like you is an understandably appealing destination.
While the consequences of making an undignified stand are obvious, the few who achieve a quiet acceptance of their lot aren’t exactly lauded for it. Sun City’s Pihalga sisters are described as “terribly and patently old, not so much in years as in their apparent unconcern at the passage of time and at the fact that it might stop.” They’re removed from the world even by the standards of their cohort, spending most days reading on the veranda, taking small breaks to show each other lines they like. In the middle of the novel, one becomes suddenly ill and dies. That night, the surviving sister returns their library books and dies too. It’s a comically extreme version of what The Berkeley Arms and The Villages offer: an unbothered, smooth transition. That they actually achieve it is only more fuel for irritation. “None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives,” Miss Rutheremer-Berkeley plainly states.
There are no such characters in Some Kind of Heaven. A confrontation with the truly contented isn’t available. Oppenheim’s discontented cast thrashes against the expectations of their new environment, but even The Villages’ happy customers aren’t buying acceptance, they’re buying a fantasy of perpetual youth and sameness. As one prospective homebuyer says to her real estate agent, “I like getting up every morning and being able to say it’s ‘It’s going to be the same way from house to house.’” The agent chimes in: “Today, as it is tomorrow, as the next year, as in five years.” The client continues: “Or ten years. Or twenty years.”
Neither text can resolve this contradiction. After a long life, a playground just for people like you is an understandably appealing destination. But as Anne says in Some Kind of Heaven’s closing voiceover, “Once you get older, you start thinking about, ‘Well, my life is not an indeterminate length of time anymore. What’s really important?’” It’s an essential question that, as demonstrated in Sun City and Some Kind of Heaven, is only obscured by the settings they depict. What a world where the elderly—which, if we’re lucky, we’ll be all of us one day—are truly supported in answering Anne’s question looks like is unclear. But it’s very different from the world we live in now. And art like this, that treats elder characters like the full people they are, is as good a start as any.