“Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias”
By Andrew D. Blechman (Atlantic Monthly Press, 244 pp., $25.00)

When I mentioned to my father — a healthy, mentally alert 82-year-old — that I was reviewing a book on life in planned communities for the elderly in the Sun Belt, he said “I’d sooner die.’’

That will be the reaction of many people who read Andrew W. Blechman’s engaging, yet depressing book, “Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias.” Others, of course, will be sufficiently excited and intrigued that they will jump on the Internet and begin researching some of the places profiled.

The oft-used phrase “different strokes for different folks,” is especially applicable when describing the wide range of preferences among older Americans about how to spend their golden years. Many of the books on the subject take an academic approach that removes much of the human dimension.

Blechman, a journalist and author of an earlier book on pigeons, is not guilty of that literary crime. Instead, by using what social scientists call the participant-observer approach, he gives readers a great sense of what it’s like to live in developments for senior citizens in remote parts of Arizona and Florida.

Most of Blechman’s attention is focused on the 20,000-acre Florida development, The Villages, which houses 75,000 residents over three counties in the central part of the Sunshine State. In his colorful descriptions he returns time and again to one of his major pet peeves, the absence of children:
“The neighborhood is so immaculate that it resembles a set from ‘Leave It To Beaver,’ but Wally and Beaver are nowhere to be seen. There are no bicycles or baseball mitts littering the yards, no school buses, no swing sets, no children playing street hockey, For that matter, there are no children,’’ he writes. “Mr. Wilson would be in heaven.’’

Forgetting his cultural mistake (Mr. Wilson was the neighbor in “Dennis the Menace”), Blechman’s points about the lack of inter-generational encounters and the sterility of life without children are well taken.

The insularity is apparent in other ways too. He describes the management-run daily newspaper that avoids serious reporting and news of the outside world. Also, the management provides only nominal input from the residents when it makes major decisions. The government is a democracy in name only.

Most of the book is not, however, an outlet for the author’s social analysis. Though when he does discuss the sociology of aging and provides a thumbnail history of senior citizen housing in this country, he makes what could be a dull subject fairly interesting.

The majority of the book provides Blechman a great outlet to display his storytelling and descriptive skills. He introduces us to a range of people from a sleazy operator who sleeps all day and spends his nights finding women to sleep with, to a retired teacher whose raison d’etre is to improve his golf game.

The man constantly on the prowl, whom Blechman calls Mr. Midnight, may be extreme in his self-centeredness, but there is a sense among many residents that the events of the world outside The Villages are irrelevant to them. “If a judge told me I could never leave the Villages again, I wouldn’t care,’’ he said. “I don’t want the real world anymore, I just want to keep getting laid.’’

Fortunately there are many other older Americans who are living in more diverse neighborhoods and still have more on their mind than what the tee time of their next golf game — but those people are not the focus of “Leisureville: Adventures In America’s Retirement Utopias.”

Blechman’s focus on the shallow leisure elder class brings to mind a song that was popular when many of today’s senior citizens were younger: “Is That All There Is?”.

Claude R. Marx, an award-winning journalist, is the author of a chapter on media and politics in “The Sixth-Year Itch,” edited by Larry Sabao.