“Penalties of June” Is a Reminder That the ’90s Are Dead, Noir Isn’t, and Life After Prison Is a Long and Difficult Road https://ift.tt/yc9F6JK
For anyone who thinks they know Florida, John Brandon’s latest novel, Penalties of June, is a reminder that there’s more to the Sunshine State than beaches and alligators. Set in the fictional town of Bethuna, Florida in June 1998, Penalties of June follows Pratt, a twenty-five-year-old, newly-paroled convict who’s spent three years behind bars after he botched a crime job with his now-deceased buddy, Matty. Complicating Pratt’s problems, and there are many of them, is an aging crime boss named Bonne, whom Pratt worked for prior to his incarceration. Bonne also happens to be Matty’s father and Pratt’s erstwhile benefactor. In the time it takes for Pratt to buy himself a very used Chrysler LeBaron and enjoy his first lunch out as a free man, he encounters two of Bonne’s goons and receives a summons from their boss for one last job.
Despite his age, Pratt is very much an orphan, and it’s hard to overlook the parallels between Pratt’s relationship with Bonne and, say, Pip’s with Magwitch in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Given that Pratt’s own parents died in a boating accident during his childhood and that the estranged uncle who raised him has since relocated to New Mexico, Bonne is the closest thing Pratt has to a father, and a demanding one at that. When Pratt meets up with Bonne in the crime lord’s warehouse and receives a gun as a welcome-home present he realizes just how great his benefactor’s expectations are. Bonne’s not calling it even until Pratt takes out Bonne’s two-timing bookkeeper, Malloy.
With this assassination mission weighing heavily on Pratt’s mind, most of the novel follows Pratt’s struggle to sever his bonds with Bonne even as he follows Malloy in the LeBaron, gunning up his courage to pull the trigger. The result is a noirish thriller brimming with regional touchstones — Publix and palm trees, anyone? — a cast of sleazy and desperate characters, and all the best the ’90s has to offer, from hair metal to cassette players to the sense of fear and wonder that accompanied the rise of the internet. Penalties is also a novel filled with ghosts, living and dead, and as Pratt tails Malloy, he also revisits past haunts: memories of his parents and uncle, his turbulent friendship with Matty, and his would-be love interest, Kallie, who dated Matty before his death and, unbeknownst to Bonne, has given birth to Matty’s child.
Though the novel is hardly a romance, Pratt’s many intricate relationships enliven, at times spicily, Pratt’s inner conflict. For example, early on, Pratt hunts down Kallie at the bakery where she works, follows her home, and meets her infant son. Throughout the rest of the book, they engage in, if not a full-fledged romance, as close to one as we can hope for between the former lover and best friend of a crime lord’s dead son. Midway through the book, the requisite detective, Gianakos, appears, and proves to be less hard-boiled than disaffected, wolfish, and hungry for Bonne’s, and Pratt’s, demise. The cat-and-mouse tactics with which he and Pratt pursue each other adds a sense of immediacy to the book. Pratt also finds himself in a borderline “bro-mantic” relationship with one of his high school baseball teammates, Tony, now the proud purveyor of a pawn shop (“Bethuna Pawned”), whose sincerity restores a sense of good faith to a story so otherwise filled with morally gray con men. We want to like Tony and will perhaps grit our teeth when Pratt continually declines Tony’s friendly offers, from baseball games to barbecues to a job at the pawn shop, making Pratt seem an ever more distant protagonist.
Such “distance” on Pratt’s part is perhaps the book’s biggest flaw. Without coming across as a genuine “tough guy,” Pratt’s prison-hardened exterior is difficult to crack. He’s more than a little redolent of, say, Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in Casablanca. Even by the novel’s end — which I liked but won’t spoil — Pratt remains hard to read, his desires ill-defined. Even conceding that this coldness may in fact be realistic, the result of Pratt’s yearslong prison stint, I wanted, constantly, to see just a little more emotion from Pratt. The book’s lack of chapters also threw me off initially, as well — who doesn’t appreciate a nod from the author that it’s time for a break? — but I found that this formatting decision bothered me less and less the more I read. Note to self: if the pacing’s good, chapter breaks may not be essential.
These issues aside, Penalties of June is a thrilling, moving, and at times very funny read. As with Brandon’s earlier work, Penalties follows the tradition of Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, whose works look past the smiles and Bibles and quiet niceties to expose the comic, absurd, and paradoxical tapestry, replete with con men and genteel Lucifers, that is the South. As in the passage below, Brandon’s descriptions of setting, of listlessness, are excellent:
St. Augustine. Miami Beach. Mount Dora. Pratt had been to Mount Dora. There was no mount there. Cape Canaveral. Sanibel Island. Pratt was in the same boat. He’d never stepped foot outside Florida either. What he knew was the state’s underfunded schools. Its potholed roads. Its weedy baseball diamonds. Its penitentiaries.
If you’re looking for a quiet, easy read to put you in the mood for the beaches and sunshine of your next vacation, look elsewhere. But if you’re up for a tale of seedy underbellies, ghouls of the past, and long, lonely highways whose crossroads look a little like perdition, a little like redemption, Penalties of June is certain to satisfy. For readers outside the South, this book offers a window into an unknown, unlit world. For readers like me, a Georgia kid who grew up equating Florida with alligators and armadillos and the nation’s best vacation spots, it offers a sobering, and refreshing, new perspective.
FICTION Penalties of June By John Brandon
McSweeney’s
Published November 26, 2024
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