Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: You are listening to WRITE ON radio on KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at KFAI.org I'm Eric Zimmerman. On tonight's program, Josh will be talking with John Brandon about his new novel, the Penalties of June. With his distinct feel for the underbelly of his home state of Florida, Brandon takes readers into the forbidding corners of the Tampa Bay area, unsavory motels, secondhand shops, no frills diners and dubious used car lots.
Pratt navigates crime bosses and drug dealers on a perilous mission. Faced with an impossible choice and the prospect of finally finding love after years behind bars, Pratt risks it all for a chance at making things right.
Then, in the last part of the hour, we will be featuring one of our legacy episodes. Join us as we dive into the archives to play one of our favorite interviews from the past. All of this and more. So stay tuned to WRITE ON radio.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: All right, John, whenever you're ready, you begin with your reading.
[00:01:36] Speaker C: The motel was two stories, but the entire upper floor was cordoned off with frayed white rope, some of the doors ripped off the hinges and nowhere to be seen.
The cab dropped Pratt in the parking lot. He stood there a minute, duffel bag at his feet, nervous for reasons he couldn't identify among ash hued cars that appeared to have been struck by lightning. He supposed it was the strangeness of complete freedom, the better part of three years. That's how long he'd been inside.
The clouds look the same out here as from the prison yard, low and billowy, undergirded with dark silver. But somehow they didn't matter as much out here. There were other things to worry about than the weather.
This place smelled worse than prison urine, gasoline, roadkill. He'd asked to be taken somewhere cheap. What did he expect?
Pratt toted his bag into the cramped check in. There was barely room to set it down. Empty scarred coffee maker, faded wood paneling. Pratt didn't feel like raising his voice. He was searching for a bell when a guy in a purple kangal hat sauntered out and lowered his weight onto a squeaky stool.
Once he'd finished chewing and got his bulk arranged, he looked up at Pratt drearily and told him it was cash in advance and checkout was 10 sharp. The man had stained teeth and a solved Rubik's cube sat on his cluttered parcel of desk.
No smokin'he, said. Okay, pratt answered.
No needles neither. The guy picked up the cube and scrambled it, then quickly turned it back to perfection.
You got pills or weed? Don't let me see it. Don't let me smell it. I don't think I do drugs anymore, pratt said. I'm pretty sure.
No parties and no hookers, the guy said, rattling his hand around in a box of keys.
I won't have any caviar either, and I promise not to block anyone in with my Porsche.
The guy tipped his head at Pratt, looking short on patience, his kangal clinging fast to his head. Oh, said Pratt. I thought we were just naming stuff. I can't afford.
The same cracked paneling from the check in covered the walls of Pratt's room, dank carpet, like all these places had mouse droppings in the corners. When he went to sleep, he knew the roaches would come out. He wasn't having a party, but the roaches would. Two nights at most, one if he was lucky. The question was, where would he go instead? He couldn't leave the state, that much the law had made clear. But it was a big state. What he needed was a car, even if it had cost him. And the real question, of course, wasn't where he would go, but would Bond let him go there? Would Bond bother to track him down if he left town? Was the old man mad at Pratt? If so, did he want to yell at him or never see him again?
Maybe the last thing Bond cared to have was a reminder in the form of his kid's best buddy that his kid was dead.
Jacksonville.
It was north. It was a place a guy could get lost in. At least it seemed that way. Spread out and mostly medium poor. The one time Pratt had been there he had his parole check ins, but he could always day trip for those a car. No matter what, he needed a car.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Very good. That was John Brandon Breen from his new novel Penalties of June. Set against the gritty backdrop of Florida's sun drenched decay, the novel follows Pratt, a man freshly released from prison, haunted by the death of his best friend Maddie and the shadowy influence of his old employer, Bon Pratt, wrest with the weight of his decisions and a glimmer of a fresh start. Brandon has published five previous books from with McSweeney's the Novels Arkansas, Citrus county and Millions, Heavens and Ivory Shoals, and the story collection Further Joy, Arkansas was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Liam Hemsworth, Vince Vaughn, and John Malkovich. Citrus county was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and was reviewed on the COVID on the New York Times Book Review. He has written about College football for GQ.com and Grandlin. He was born in Florida and now resides in Minnesota, where He teaches at Ham University in St. Paul. John Brandon, welcome to write on Radio.
[00:06:08] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Penalties of June. It combines drama, crime, and literary fiction. Did you aim for this blend from the outset, or did you emerge with this synthesized stylings organically?
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Well, I guess I knew I wanted to do my version of a noir.
I usually have a several different points of view, and I wanted to do like they do in noir a lot, with just the one point of view. And it was the kind of thing where I knew, okay, the. The character won't be a detective, but he'll wind up doing detective work, you know, which is one model that you see for that.
So, you know, it's a. It's kind of. I call it a daytime. A daylight noir. So it's Florida, it's hot, it's sunny, you know, rather than being kind of urban and it's dark all the time. Right.
But I knew. I knew he was going to be doing things like watching people and staking people out a lot and trying to figure out how to get out of the problem that he's put in, you know, in the first part of the book.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: You know, that's actually a really good point, and I didn't really think of this until now, but so much of the noir tradition deals with characters who cannot move from their past. Was it something you were conscious about while you're writing?
[00:07:28] Speaker C: Well, I. I knew that. I knew that, you know, I wanted Pratt to have some kind of problem that was. That was big early on. And then, you know, he's. He's kind of in the. In this place that is his home, but that he doesn't want to be in anymore. And so it. And everywhere he goes, there's something haunting. You know, he's got kind of a love interest, but it's tied up in the past. It's not right because of things that have happened in the past. And, you know, his friend Maddie, who was referred to in that excerpt, died while he was in prison. So there's sort of every reason for him to want to leave, but it's also. It's also his home.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Let's get. Yeah, well, I'm gonna ask you about that a little bit later, but I want to ask you first about the actual structure of Penalties of June. The first thing I noticed was there's a lack of chapters in it. I mean, there's narrative breaks. Like, you had the asterisks at the Top. And there's, like, section breaks. But I was wondering why you eschewed having, like, chapter one, chapter two, or titans of chapters in the book. Was that. Why did you choose this way to tell your story?
[00:08:42] Speaker C: I have never been capable of writing chapters. I have never written a chapter.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Really.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: I really admire people who can do it, which, you know, some books are in chapters, and it feels a little, like, arbitrary. Not that that detracts from the book at all, but it feels like, well, they think there should be chapters, and that's the end of a scene. So make a chapter.
And, you know, there are some people who. They write a chapter and it feels like it almost just stands alone.
And, you know, you're satisfied at the end of it. You want to go on, but you're also feeling like, oh, that was an experience in itself. And that's probably related to why I can't write traditional short stories. I wind up, you know, taking the conventions apart and being zany and postmodern. And I try to write short stories because I just can't manage to make that package and put a bow on it.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:38] Speaker C: And so I've never written a chapter. All my books are written like this one. So sometimes they'll be in three parts, you know, which. Okay. You know, that's. That's. I can do. That's a little bit of structure. But mostly it's now this happens, and then there's a line break, and now this happens next, and there's a line break, and now we're over here next. And it. You know, it hardly ever occurs to me that there's any time between those line breaks. Like there's any. Any time is more important than any other line break is more important than any other line break.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Occasionally you go like, oh, this. That's. That's the end of part one. You know, I could end part one there. Somebody got killed, or, you know, something happened that. But my brain will not make chapters.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Despite that, I actually find that it's really unique. But you do a great job, though. Of the novel oscillates between moments of reflection and then these bursts of tense action. How do you approach structuring the pacing to maintain the reader's engagement? Are you cognizant of this while you're writing? Like, we have this right now, there hasn't been much action. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:10:47] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, to me, the.
The. The plot is the hard part.
I know all writers are different in that, and some of them have a hard time with the character part, they have a hard time with the reflection.
To me, I knew that stuff would just happen.
Plot is, to me, the hardest thing. I mean, people that can do these really elegant, propulsive plots I really admire. So I was focused on that kind of from the beginning. I was like, okay, I want to try to have enough plot in this. And it was. What I was always worried about was, is there enough plaza, enough plot? So I kind of, you know, if the character is revealing something that's really important, I feel like it takes as long as it takes, and the reader will like it anyway. They want that information.
There were times, though, writing the book where I was really conscious of how long it was until another kind of big thing happened, you know, until another important character came in or there was another twist. I could feel pressure, you know, to like, okay, so, for instance, like, part of it that is just integral to the book is he's sitting in Florida in this hot car, you know, watching different people for different reasons.
And I thought, you know, I don't want to skip that. I don't want to make it fast. I want the reader to feel like they're sitting, sweating, sticking to the seat of this hot car, drinking this now hot soda, you know, getting a stiff back. But also, if that's going on for pages and pages, as a writer, you feel like, okay, not. Not enough's happening. We're sitting still. So I wound up, you know, doing it longer the first time. The first time you stake someone out, I take my time with it. So, like, this is the whole experience of this, that it was important for me to, you know, it's hot, it's humid. This is what the neighborhood's like. And then after that, it was almost like shorthand. You know, I didn't have to stay with those moments as long, and I felt like, well, I've trained the reader to know what that's like. So now I can do it a little shorter and a little shorter each time. But I was conscious, and partly because I was thinking of, like, I want this to be a little more like a noir thing. Of, like, okay, the reflection's nice, the character work's nice, the character dynamics, but also, like, what's happening, what can happen next?
And just thinking about making his situation more complicated.
So, you know, every so many pages, it's like, okay, I want this to get a little more complicated.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Maddie's death, you said before, haunts, I think, the novel and drives much of Pratt's guilt. How did you approach revealing Maddie's story incrementally to the reader.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's known. It's known pretty early.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I was. Yeah, sorry.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: That Maddie. The Maddie is dead.
And every once in a while, when Pratt's thinking about it, I guess you get. You get more. More depth around what their relationship was like and why. This is, you know, devastating to Pratt. But. But the. The actual, like, what happened the night when they got caught and, you know, Pratt took the rap and went to prison, which turned out to be a bad decision because Maddie, on his own, he was too wild and, you know, wound up dead. But what actually happened that night is kept a secret until Pratt tells it to Callie, you know, later in the book, which I like. I did that. I mean, I wanted to do that. I wanted to have the reader not quite have the right idea of what happened that night, but two have the right idea of this is what their relationship was like. And, you know, Maddie's family kind of took Pratt in. He was sort of a de facto member of that. Of that family. And their dynamic was always that Pratt looked out for Maddie. Maddie was wild. And, you know, Pratt was along and would do his bodyguard stuff when he needed to and keep. He was kind of the brakes for Maddie. So he, you know, he's. He's feeling now like he's got some of the blame for not being there. He thought it was a good idea to take the rap for, you know, but turned out not to be.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Despite his dire circumstances, Pratt often uses humor, such as his banter with the motel clerk that you just. You showed earlier. Was his humor meant to humanize him or serve another narrative purpose?
[00:15:50] Speaker C: I guess I hope it humanizes him, and I hope it just kind of breaks the bleak tone up, because it does get pretty bleak at times. You've got this guy whose parents died, best friend. You know, it's a lot of people dying, and now he's supposed to.
He's supposed to make another person dead.
You know, so I think I did have an instinct to find ways to break that up some so it doesn't feel just claustrophobically bleak. So, you know, there's his friend Tony, his old friend Tony, who is sort of funny and serves that purpose a little bit, and then the gas station clerk. That one at the start of it, I just felt like I had no purpose for that other than this guy is funny and they have funny interactions.
But, you know, as you get a draft and then you go into the next draft, you sort of feel like, well, this guy pops up too many times in this book to just be funny, you know, to. It just be the same kind of. They're ribbing each other over and over. So that was something I did sort of after the first draft was figure out how can. How can they have some kind of moment that's more important later on?
But, yeah, started as exactly what you said. Just thinking, like, I want to humanize them and I want there to be some humor.
You know, I mean, it almost. Sometimes books are so bleak to me that it feels artificial because it doesn't matter what's happening. There's still a joke to be made. Someone still laughs that day, you know, no matter what.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: So, yeah, Bon is central to the novel's world, yet remains shrouded in mystery. How did you craft Bon's character to maintain both his influence over Pratt's life and also maintain his distance?
[00:17:57] Speaker C: Well, so I liked. I liked the idea that, you know, it was. It was no problem that Pratt was friends with Maddie when they were little kids, but as they get older, they get brought slowly into Bond's business.
So, you know, the stakes start to go up around their friendship and things that they're expected to do.
And it. You know, Bon is kind of a father figure for Pratt, you know, after his father died. So, you know, he seeks his approval and always did, but also knows at this point he wants to go somewhere else and do somewhere else. He doesn't want to be under Bond's thumb.
But I thought a lot about making Bond sympathetic and human, too. You know, he's got his own problems, and it really was one of the more interesting things to me of the moments where Pratt has to choose whether to be loyal to Bon or not, and that it really does mean something to him to not betray Bon. Yeah, he's trying to figure out how to get away from him, but he also doesn't want to screw him over in any way. That makes it even trickier.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: For Pratt, Callie serves as a symbol, I believe, of both nostalgia and unattainable ideals for Pratt. What inspired her portrayal as a figure who is, I think, in the book, describes being good to the bone, yet stuck in challenging circumstances.
[00:19:33] Speaker C: Yeah, she's a character that I could write her pretty easily because she's the kind of character, I feel like, who is really, really good hearted, really strong moral compass and all that, but also is not exactly nice, you know, is kind of especially sort of with Pratt at the beginning, has kind of a hard edge towards him.
Yeah, I mean, she was she was a character that every time she was in the scene, I knew what she was going to say. And I really liked writing her.
And when I gave the original draft to my agent, she was like, well, you need more of Cali. Like, the book just needs more of Callie.
And I was like, okay. So I sort of made another scene with Callie. I expanded her role a little bit and gave it back to my agent. And she said, you need more of Callie still. And I was like, well, you mean, like point of view sections.
She's like, whatever. Just whatever. Just more of Cali. So my goal that I started with, to just have the one point of view I eventually abandoned. And now Callie has her own. Has a few point of view sections. And then along with that came the realization for me that I should have had from the beginning, which was that the problem was Callie didn't have any influence over the ending that was holding it back. She's there.
She was a love interest who was really complicated for Pratt. They're sort of doomed from the start, and a character that I loved writing, but she didn't do anything sort of at the end. And that helped me reformulate the plot so that she could have a hand in, you know, the resolution.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: And at that point, I felt like I had answered my agents. Like, I. Okay, I see. I see what the problem is. I had to go the long way around and bring her more into it, give her point of view. And I finally was like, but this was the problem all along, that she didn't. She didn't have, you know, sort of any power in the ending.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: The setting, with its decaying motels and car lots and dive diners, feels like a character in itself. How did you research or draw upon this backdrop to amplify the novel's tone?
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Well, I've written. Written things in other parts of Florida before, but this is the part where I'm from.
And I sort of avoided it for a while for reasons that are hard, I guess, hard for me to explain.
It just felt a little suffocating. It felt a little like I know too much about it to. To use it the way that I need to use it. Because if you're trying to be too true to everything I feel like, then you're. You start hindering yourself.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:44] Speaker C: So what I did was, you know, since I. I do sort of know it so well, what I did was I just invented the main town where most things take place. That way, it could be however long I wanted it to be to get to all these different real places. And it took the pressure off of someone going, well, that's, that's actually not that close to that. He couldn't drive that that fast. So I had one invented town in the middle of. Of all this, this real geography.
But yeah, I mean, this was, this is my. This is like the strip malls, you know, that's, that's what I feel like that's where I'm from. It's like the.
There's no place with crappier looking strip malls and a million of them. And, you know, in Newport Richey, which is really. It's like Pasco, Hernando County, Newport, Richie Spring Hill, you're not on the beach. You know, the beach is south of there and then it's north of there. So it's just kind of a place where if you're a mile inland, it feels like you're 100 miles inland. Yeah. You know, and there's.
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's much. It is much grittier than I think the normal conception People have a Florida, the vacation, vacationy areas, you know, bleeding into kind of the southern, you know, the, the south creeps down into that section and the tropical creeps north. And so it's just kind of a, you know, lower middle class mix of stuff. That's.
That's. Yeah, that's what I'm familiar with.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: I just got a two minute warning from my soundboard engineers. I have one more question I want to ask you then. Without giving too much away, do you see Pratt's final decision as an escape or a continuation of his entrapment? And did you consider alternate endings?
[00:24:47] Speaker C: Well, so I kind of kept his, you know, his uncle in play, you know, during the book.
Enough. And, you know, without giving too much away, I felt like, you know, the way I think of endings is sort of, what. What's the. What's the mixture of happy and sad? What's the mixture of hopeless and hopeful?
And so I felt like there's no way he's getting out of this without doing something that he doesn't want to do, you know, But I also wanted, sort of wanted it to feel like, okay, but there's a ray of light. Also.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: We are out of time. This has been. I've been speaking with John Brandon about his recently published novel from McSweeney's penalties of June, available now wherever books are sold. John, thanks for being on the program.
[00:25:39] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: And now this.
