In Tove Jansson’s comic novel, Sun City, set in a retirement community in Florida, the residents of the Berkeley Arms engage in mischief and mayhem. Much of the action takes place in the rocking chairs on the veranda. If they choose a chair unwisely, they are stuck beside people they dislike, because no one ever changes chairs. (It is considered a breach of etiquette.) My favorite characters, two sisters who make trips to the library and read all day, are the only residents who die in the course of the novel. The question is: Who will get their chairs? Out of respect for the dead, the residents hesitate.

Yet this charming novel is not quite what you’d call cozy. There is constant friction between the characters. On the veranda, the cantankerous Mr. Thompson, the only man at the Berkeley Arms, pretends to be deaf, but hears when he wants to, and insults the women. Mrs. Morris, who arrived weeks earlier with a sore throat, sits in the chair beside him and pretends to have lost her voice, which allows her to think in silence. Her neighbor in the next chair, Miss Peabody, a timid soul, says very little, but is riddled with malice, which breaks out against Miss Frey, the unpopular, affected manager.

Not much happens, but this is a sweet, funny, unusual novel. Jansson, best-known in the U.S. for her children’s series, The Moomins, discovered the “sun cities,” i.e., retirement communities, in her travels to Florida. Her character portraits are filled with details that can be as startling and Gothic as Flannery O’Connor’s.

For instance, Bounty Joe, one of the attendants, is a Jesus freak who rides a motorcycle. In his girlfriend’s room, he ” fixed the altar above the bed and propped up the shelf so it would sit straight. He had run an electric cord to the lamp above God’s Mother, who stood in the altar with her plastic flowers and the sugar skulls form Guadalajara.” Throughout the novel, Joe awaits a letter from Miami announcing the Second Coming.

Sun City is a brilliant, elegantly-written novel, and a fast read. Translated by Thomas Teal, it is one of five of Jansson’s novels published by NYRB Classics.