True enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen ... Operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot ... It feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock ... Proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant.
Offers a kind of picaresque ... 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...is rendered ostensibly futile by/in old age ... For all of Jansson’s jokes, the tone tends mournful, or just depressed.
It can be hard to tell Jansson’s characters apart. They all mourn and nurse their private grievances. The blur may be intentional: the sun seems to dry the distinctions out of them, and they know it ... This book’s original dust jacket called it 'an indictment of the American way of old age,' which is too strong an assertion for such a wistful tale, though it has notes of well-deserved condescension. Probably only a Scandinavian could have written it. Jansson knew she’d be retiring to the ample bosom of the Finnish welfare state, not hacking it out with clipped coupons and wraparound sunglasses.
The novel approaches each character with open-hearted curiosity ... Not a novel of nice-but-occasionally-prickly folks going gentle into that good night ... Art like this, that treats elder characters like the full people they are, is as good a start as any.
Brisk and surprising ... As this concise novel nears its conclusion, the chapters become shorter, speedier, breathier ... 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.
