Ania Szremski
In Tove Jansson’s newly reissued novel set in a Florida retirement home, old age is not wasted on the elderly.
Sun City, by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal, New York Review Books, 214 pages, $16.95
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The setting: St. Petersburg, Florida—a place underrepresented, one could argue, in literature; a place where palm trees row up in artificially neat lines, where busloads of tourists pause to visit the famed movie-boat from Mutiny on the Bounty, where “there are more hairdressers . . . than anywhere else in the country.” The cast: aged women, and the occasional man (since most of them are dead by now), at the late stage of life also underrepresented, one could argue, in literature, residing at the Berkeley Arms retirement home on Second Avenue. They live together not by choice but by uneasy, fateful circumstance, spending their days in the rocking chairs that are never moved from the veranda, their seating order implacable, unless someone dies, freeing up a spot. This is Sun City, a brisk and surprising novel by Finnish artist, illustrator, and author Tove Jansson. (It was originally published in Swedish in 1974; faithful Jansson translator Thomas Teal’s lucid, yet whimsical, English version of 1976 is now being reissued by New York Review Books.) If Jansson was mostly preoccupied with the wild elements of the natural world, both in her globally beloved Moomin comics and in the adult fiction she wrote in her last three decades, here, she is interested, instead, in a synthetic universe, man-made and mechanical, devised in particular US American fashion to sequester the elderly away from “productive” society, in a preternaturally sunny silo where they won’t “be in the way.”
The narrative flits quickly and seamlessly between perspectives, shifting every once in a while, without comment or warning, from an observational third-person to a confessional first. We get glimpses into the minds of the seventy-seven-year-old Mrs. Morris, who, after so many years of composing scores for films, is now afraid of music and increasingly retreating from speech; the kindly, craft-inclined, shortsighted Hannah Higgins, on the cusp of seventy-eight; the obscene and cutting matriarch Mrs. Rubinstein, eighty-one; the indigent, cantankerous, even malicious Mr. Thompson, aged eighty; the cringingly compassionate Miss Peabody, seventy-four. They are tended to by the lizardish Miss Frey, always clad in brightly colored pants, past midlife already at age sixty-five but not yet old in the way of her charges, who exasperate her so, who function like mirrors revealing her near future. Far younger still are Linda, the home’s unusually beautiful Mexican housekeeper, and Joe, her Jesus-crazed lover and the ticket-taker at the Bounty movie-boat; both are foils to the others, placing their faith in the illusion of an unbroken horizon of a future that seems long and deep and distant.
On one hand, not much happens, in the traditional sense of a plot. Everyone is mostly waiting—Joe for Jesus; Linda for a sublime erotic encounter; the rest, ultimately, for death. It’s a lonely waiting punctuated by petty grievances, intricate interpersonal battles, lunches at the senior canteen and beers at the local bar, the great spring dance and its parade of fancy hats, the deaths of some St. Petersburg inhabitants and the arrival of new retirees. Even those fatalities are barely plot points, never dwelled upon for long, the characters simply dropping out of the story. Death is the wildest and strangest thing that a human will ever experience, but in this setting it is sanitized and protected from view, now-inert bodies swiftly removed from the field of vision by emergency vehicles that discreetly glide through the streets without their sirens. But on the other hand, this “not much” is described, as is typical of Jansson, with such devotion to detail that the story teems with movement. In her seemingly incidental style, she demonstrates how the mind always continues its ceaseless roil, perhaps in a way that’s even more interesting at the end than when one is still plowing through the beginning and middle of a life. This is the attitude held by the home’s philosophical proprietor, the eldest of all the characters: Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley, ninety-three, who practices “entertaining new and irrational ideas” and insists on defending “the irrational surplus acquired in the course of a long life.”
Jansson herself was about sixty when she penned Sun City, after a tour of the US and Mexico. Perhaps because she didn’t start writing adult fiction until her late fifties, having witnessed the ageing and dying of her parents and with her own future rushing up before her, she often pictured old age in her short stories and novels, most famously in 1972’s The Summer Book, a dreamy chronicle of an ancient grandmother and a six-year-old girl summering on a remote Finnish island. In stark contrast to so many depictions of the aged in literature and film, her elderly characters are not sweet, inoffensive, wise, or unknowable—they are hot-blooded, marred by flaws and colored in with fantasies and dreams, still filled with the anxieties and preoccupations of their previous decades as well as with brand-new ones, experimenting with different attitudes and ways of perceiving and being. Mr. Thompson, after suffering a destabilizing personal shock, begins to imagine the garden outside his window is a jungle, “dark green and impenetrable. His trees were frightening in their immensity and rose out of perpetual dusk toward an inaccessible roof of orchids, a flaming jungle roof over wild animals, dreamers, and mad millionaires.” Mrs. Higgins now finds “the world much prettier than it was,” for “thanks to her poor eyes, colors always flowed out over their borders and mixed with the light very luminously. . . . Where the young Hannah had seen what she was used to seeing, the old Hannah saw reality freed from habit and unnecessary detail.” They are all still becoming, because, after all, everyone always is.
As this concise novel nears its conclusion, the chapters become shorter, speedier, breathier, until they take us to St. Petersburg’s diametric opposite: the feral Eden that is Silver Springs, visited by Linda and Joe on his Honda motorcycle, which can reach speeds of 120 miles an hour, and by select residents of the Berkeley Arms, under the watchful eye of Miss Frey, who get there much more slowly, in a bus, for a daylong field trip. There is artifice here, too, in the glass-bottom boats that ferry tourists out for short rides on the pure waters of the site’s fabled river; in Bambi’s Playground, the cramped petting zoo aimed at children and old folks alike. But even these feeble infrastructures cannot impose order and control on the wilderness that surrounds them, a real jungle that entices Mr. Thompson, Miss Peabody, and Miss Frey, in turn, to trespass one remaining corner of “a pretty little part of America’s untouched youth.” Hallucinations abound in this “beauty of emptiness and extinction”; a nude Linda and Joe surreally float through the swampy waters like Adam and Eve; an arrow arcs magnificently through the sky like a portent. It is unclear exactly what happens to them in this untamed place, the native habitat of Jansson’s febrile imagination—the same way that life is unclear, even from the vantage of its end, coming in and out of focus, its subplots never resolved, its meaning stubbornly unrevealed, which is the magic of being alive in the first place.
Ania Szremski is the senior editor of 4Columns.