Sun City by Tove Jansson

There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll beneath the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentleman, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person--some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. 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. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about things such as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, craft materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception.

The name of the retirement home at the center of Tove Jansson's novel Sun City is utterly perfect: Friendship's Rest. The old people who fill it, this retirement home in St. Petersburg, Florida--still, somehow, nearly fifty years later, the epicenter of America's old people--are sometimes friends, and sometimes at rest, but sometimes they hate each other. Eager-to-please Evelyn Peabody finds a great deal of catharsis in finally letting herself hate the bitter Catherine Frey. Thompson--one of the retirement home's few men--hates everyone more or less, but especially the gardener, on whom he loves to play cruel tricks. He also hates his wife, who shows up one day at Friendship's Rest wondering where he's been for the last twenty years. Rebecca Rubinstein, who cruises through the home like a Borscht Belt Battleship, looks down at them all with a sense of wry bemusement. Even the happy-go-lucky residents, like Hannah Higgins, who seems content to spend her final days with a pair of knitting needles in hand, follow a strict hierarchy of arrangement of veranda rocking chairs that adumbrates all the social relations at Friendship's Rest. The novel has a lot to say about what it's like to be in the last years of your life, and one such message is that you most certainly do not outgrow pettiness and resentment.

I loved Sun City. It felt like a novel that someone wrote specifically for me. And though I have loved Tove Jansson's books before, especially the lovely Summer Book, I never would have expected this particular book from her. It reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald: comic and insightful, with a large and slightly absurd cast of characters. Most of them, of course, are old people, but the novel has exactly two young people: "Bounty Joe," a motorcycle-driving Jesus Freak hippie who works as an ersatz swashbuckler at the HMS Bounty, a "movie ship" in St. Petersburg harbor, and his girlfriend, Linda, Friendship Rest's Mexican housekeeper. Joe is waiting for a letter to come from another group of Jesus Freaks that will summon him in the case of, I guess, Jesus Christ's return, and as the letter keeps not coming, he grows increasingly frustrated and bitter. Linda is sweet, and sort of simple-wise, and her philosophy of finding beauty in each moment contrasts with Joe's frustrated millenarianism. It struck me that, in the sense that he is waiting for an imminent world to the end, Joe is both an interesting variation on and contradiction of the old people at Friendship's Rest: they are all waiting for an end that's just around the corner, but Joe seems to think that he will be spared the full progression of life that is the inheritance of every fortunate person.

"Death is young," Peabody remarks cryptically. She is watching a young boys' chorus: "In an irrational moment she got the idea that they were harbingers of death, that they were like death itself, relentless, incomprehensible, and beautiful." Beautiful!? This sort of shocking insight, the surprising word, is the kind of thing that reminds me of Fitzgerald and one of the reasons that I found the book so satisfying. No doubt Thomas Teal's translation from Swedish has a lot to do with the book's impact as well. It's not a perfect novel where all the different threads are brought cleanly and elegantly together; in fact, the ending is kind of a mess: the residents of Friendship's Rest end up at one of Central Florida's freshwater springs at the same time that Bounty Joe and Linda are also there on a long-awaited excursion. It's a curated experience, but the Florida jungle lurks at the margins, full of shadows and monkeys. The residents get loose and lost, and the whole thing is sort of a mess, and when it was over I thought, well, what was the point of all that? But I liked the book a little bit better for that, too, for the way it denies a straightforwardly legible resolution. Because what does the end of one's life ever resolve?