new writing: tove jansson's sun city

(at wapo)

Rob Bixby via Wikimedia Commons

NYRB Classics recently re-issued Tove Jansson’s novel Sun City. I reviewed it for the Washington Post, but if you want the takeaway… it’s a good novel but it’s not her best:

But the novel also suffers in comparison to Jansson’s other books. Her focus on a panorama of the elderly is quite different from her other fiction, which often involves a smaller cast of characters — sometimes only two people — who are often physically isolated from the wider world. Ultimately, the book suffers under the weight of this ambition. The relationship between two or three people on an island exists within strict conditions: No matter how volatile, intimate or cruel, the players are fixed. When you can simply walk away from one tedious companion to find another you like better, it’s not the same, even if you’re still stuck in the same boardinghouse together.

In short, if you haven’t ever read Jansson’s fiction, start elsewhere. (But if you have read most of her translated fiction, check it out.) As to where to start—The Summer Book is great but the first book of hers I ever read is a collection titled A Winter Book. That it’s called A Winter Book is sort of a gimmick—it is not the winter novel sequel to The Summer Book—but in any case it would be a fine place to start too.

I mention this in the review but Jansson’s fiction often focuses on old age—Sun City is set in a retirement community, but other books of hers also feature older characters. This ends up highlighting the degree to which such books are—I think?—not really all that common, unlike adolescence and middle age, which are staple subjects. (One also has to distinguish between books that are about old age and books which just have old people in them—for instance a friend suggested Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, but I don’t think that’s really about being old.)

I listed a few examples of books about old age in the review—

Only a few novels that are really and seriously about [old age] come to mind: Elizabeth Taylor’s “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” Barbara Pym’s “Quartet in Autumn,” Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” Alice Thomas Ellis’s “The Skeleton in the Cupboard” and Barbara Comyns’s “The House of Dolls.”

—and noticed afterward that these books are mostly about “extra” women who have either outlived their husbands, as in Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, or were never married at all, as in Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn. (The major outlier here is Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.) One of my favorite books about old age is Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Skeleton in the Cupboard, the second book of her great and underread Summer House trilogy, which is… also about a widow. So if old age is somewhat under-explored, it seems like being an old man is explored even less.

NB, if you want another perspective—my friend

bradley babendir

also reviewed Sun City for the Baffler.