Sun City

By: Tove Jansson

Published by New York Review of Books, 2025-02-18

From the author of The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart but as full-blooded people with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. It’s no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, so the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms’s newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda, while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “Nobody’s normal anymore,” as the bartender says, “not the old geezers and not the newborn kids.”