March 28, 2022 Issue

In this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten visits a retirement village in Florida and writes about it. Sound exciting? Actually, it’s terrific! One reason is that the community in question – Latitude Margaritaville, in Daytona – turns out to be a genuinely fun place to live. Another is that Paumgarten, as we know from previous pieces, can be witheringly skeptical about man-made paradises: see, for example, his evisceration of Augusta National in “Unlike Any Other” (The New Yorker, June 24, 2019). So when you start reading this piece, you don’t know how it’s going to go. Will it be a scoff or a spree? It turns out to be a bit of both. Along the way, it affords the pleasure of reading Paumgarten at his descriptive best. For example:

Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve. 

And:

Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air.

And:

The night went by in a wash of gentle, well-rehearsed and well-worn folk rock, amid video imagery of reefs, coves, beaches, sailboats, cocktails, Jet Skis, cheeseburgers, and resort developments—a kind of subliminal indoctrination into the blurred line between the wild and the tame, the pristine and the industrialized. 

“Five O’Clock Everywhere” is a wonderful exploration of “retirement the Margaritaville way.” I enjoyed it immensely.