Also in Medium.com 3/22/2025
Tove Jansson’s Novel Sun City
Tove Jansson’s novel, or maybe part memoir, Sun City, published 50 years ago as I write this in 2025, takes an ironic and sad look at a retirement community in the retirement town of St. Petersburg, Florida.
She wrote the book about the same time that my paternal grandfather and his second wife were aging out of their own retirement home in St. Pete. Their mental and physical health failing, both died a few years after the English translation of Jansson’s book was published. They weren’t readers of fiction, so I doubt either of them read the book.
I doubt too that either of my parents ever read the book. Had they done so, they might have been dissuaded from taking over my grandparents’ Florida house after their passing. But they did take the house over and they stayed in it during their own retirement years until the oppressiveness of their St. Pete retirement a dozen years later convinced them to move back to Detroit. What Detroit might have lacked in climate warmth, it had in abundance in proximity to the friends and family warmth that Florida had largely separated them from.
St. Pete, as Jansson describes it, is smoke and mirrors for the group of randomly thrown together inhabitants of the Berkeley Arms retirement home. All the residents came from away, convinced of the promise that the facility would provide a location around which would flow a stimulating and rewarding clutch of people, events, and activities. It was the appeal of sustaining or maybe even starting a bustling, enriching life. In fact, they ended up surrounded by people they primarily found fault with, people they had to endure, rather than enjoy.
It was not that way with my parents. They didn’t go with the expectation that life would be more exciting than it had been for them in Detroit. That life, to be frank, was pretty pedestrian, ho-hum even. Working, raising kids, little time for leisure. They went because my father’s brother and sister had preceded them there and because of the appeal of snowless winters.
We, their kids, visited enough that they could convince themselves they were operating a haven of sorts. But not being retirees ourselves and visiting as we did in the muggy Florida summers, we were not seduced by the Paradise PR about the state. We left glad to head on home and none of us has in our own retirement years succumbed to the Florida hype. We’re year round Yankees who appreciate, or at least tolerate the cold.
What finally induced my parents to sell their home in St. Pete and return north was loneliness. And that loneliness was precipitated by the relentless advance of death among their circle of friends and neighbors. It’s an inevitable course of events, of course, one I’m experiencing now as well. The houses of their deceased friends were not re-occupied by people of their own generation, so making new friends didn’t happen. New retirees comprise a different class than older retirees, it seems. Maybe the newcomers believe still in their invincibility?
Jansson evidently visited the Sunshine state around the time she was in her 60’s and likely formed her impression of the state from that visit. She made the visit with her partner at a time when homosexuality opened only a limited number of doors to friendships. It’s not hard to see that with her novelist eye St. Pete wouldn’t deliver the kind of permitting environment that was then on the horizon of her native Finland. She wouldn’t likely have directly experienced the people she envisioned for her novel. It’s more likely that she extrapolated from her own experience in caring for her own parents to portray the unhappinesses and disappointments of her characters living without family.
My parents’ move back to Detroit was supposed to open a gateway to a new start. They bided their time making that start by staying with my brother, but the new beginning never began. My father passed away not too long after the move, leaving my mother to linger, missing him for another dozen years. She was, though, spared the loneliness of growing yet older in the company of strangers because she continued living on with my brother.
She didn’t always smile during those years, often troubled by my father’s death and some of her kids casualness about religion, but she did laugh and smile often enough. I’ve wondered from time to time, though, how genuine her enjoyment of life was, whether her smiles reflected some undercurrent of joy.
When I look for proof in images of the joy aging people supposedly feel, there is no lack of examples. They’re everywhere in the smiles you’ll see on all the people in medical advertising. Pop a pill and pop a smile. Photographers see older people smiling everywhere. They seem to prefer to find them that way and maybe they even mug behind the camera to induce them to smile. I do that when I photograph young kids. In any case, these images are much more common than photos of the destitute and forgotten and depressed.
I’m sure if Jansson took photos of the people she encountered in St. Pete she must have found some sad, lonely, confused faces and wondered why they weren’t showing themselves like in the ads. Maybe she even sought out those sad faces because she needed them to populate her book to make it more honest than the ads.
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