The Brooklyn Rail

Tove Jansson has been having a sort of “hot girl” moment: funny, to me, for whom The Summer Book (1972) is anti-“hot girl lit” canon. Written after the death of her mother and as the Finnish artist and writer was approaching sixty, Jansson’s beloved first novel, about a grandmother and her young granddaughter on a skerry in the Gulf of Finland, is yes, about summer, and yes (Scandi) island life—but it is really about death, time, and grief. And it is really Grandmother’s book—not Sophia’s, and not Summer’s. Especially by its final pages, when we are suddenly in Grandmother’s body like never before. Calculating what it’d take to get up, and go outside (“Swing your legs over the edge.… Four steps to the door…”).

I see Sun City, now reissued in Thomas Teal’s translation, as a sequel. Jansson’s second takes the less “hot” concerns of her first and puts them, well, dead center: the sun city here is a retirement community in St. Petersburg, Florida—a place of “pensions, cremation, and legal problems,” where it is “always summer.” Like its precursor, Sun City offers a kind of picaresque. In twenty-one chapters in the lives of the residents and workers at one Berkeley Arms—senior home, “kindergarten,” “graveyard,” “jungle”—we get, from opening to closing veranda scene: the “movie ship” and the hair salon; a napkin incident and a jello; a Scottish wanderer and a (surprise!) wife; the much-awaited Spring Ball, with its Cavalcade of Hats, and a trip to the “genuine” jungle at last. The daily routines and schemes, plots and plot twists, big events and days-after: the anticipations, distractions, and revenges of the elderly. 

As our amphibious narrator’s focalization shifts between the variously mouse-ish (Miss Peabody), devilish (Mr. Thompson), or reserved (Mrs. Morris) residents, and variously reserved or frazzled (Miss Frey) workers, the question such narrative modes always beg—that of knowledge and its limits, the limits of our ability to know one another—is rendered ostensibly futile by/in old age. Not worth the effort—there’s not enough time left! At least in the characters’ eyes. Too many hours for thoughts of Papa, who “loved the Excursion Concept but had no organizational talent.… How is it possible that they’re all dead?”—but not enough to share them.

“Bad legs,” bad backs; the relief of “restful and secure” high tables, or when grace is this: “Sometimes her headache would start a little later than expected”—these are the mind-bodies of Sun City, which, as a sick person since nineteen (a reader and writer who stands with Grandmother and grandmothers worldwide!), I was glad to see occupied. But also: the grace itself, or at least occasional dignity, of the ever-aging body. Nowhere is this clearer than at the Spring Ball—where “MEMBERS DANCE AT THEIR OWN RISK,” a sign warns—but “a Spring Ball was a wonderful thing,” and a wonderful thing is a wonderful thing. Behold the bespangled, be-hatted, and muscular-stomached Rebecca Rubinstein: “magnificent,” indeed.

But eventually the body does drop: “… dead!”—on the dance floor, no less. “‘It’s the Mayor’ … ‘He never did like to dance …’” For all of Jansson’s jokes, the tone tends mournful, or just depressed. Here we get in full the depressed-elder representation The Summer Book offered in half: “wise” or “sage,” maybe; but what about sad and cross, having lost the urge to tell of one’s life, and/or the ability. Especially to anyone young or younger, like Mrs. Rubinstein’s son and granddaughters—Libanonna and Shurele. Mrs. Rubinstein’s epic letters to “My dreadful son” Abrascha own their own, and very meta, chapters: “Sometimes I toy with the idea of writing you an amusing description of the old people awaiting their final departure on the sunlit veranda.… But I tell myself…that these weary souls can only have a purely fictional significance for you.”  Alas, impossible to convince others of the inconceivable: that someday, you, too.  

If not for the “old asses,” then come for the fascination of seeing how the Finnish artist takes on a very different kind of summer life: “Florida!” Jansson has her moments with the American landscape—highway-side bushes “like dollops of pink pudding”—but can lean cliché: see Linda, the Mexican cleaner, with a Mama back in Guadalajara and a steady smile; or Bounty Joe, her moto- and Jesus-loving boyfriend, eating ketchup with five slices of bread for second dessert. Things grow increasingly garish and heavy-handed in the book’s long closer, a group trip to Silver Springs—American tourism at its finest, featuring a snake farm, a “Bambi’s Playground,” and crucially, plot-wise, a Jungle Trail: a fluorescent fever dream of a finale that ultimately excuses itself as some sort of individual and collective “senior moment” (I think?).

Grandmother would want to hate all this—the Berkeley Arms, St. Pete—like she hates euphemism. When her (only?) (…living?) friend reports that another friend’s “no longer among us,” she responds impatiently: 

“Oh, you mean he’s dead” … She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.

This, Sun City, is the discussion, one in which Grandmother would’ve killed. Maybe she would’ve found a fellow hater, belated rebel, even an intelligent conversationalist—or smart abstainer—in Mrs. Rubinstein, who “detest[s] platitudes more than silence.” Or don’t forget Elizabeth Morris, who doesn’t “believe there are so many things left to be afraid of”: “Nebraska, maybe, and confidences, and certain kinds of music, but not death.” Give Mrs. Morris and company what Sophia can’t give Grandmother; what Mrs. Morris gives on the piano to stay the silence: “She gave them time.”