Remembering the ’90s: An Interview with John Brandon

Remembering the ’90s: An Interview with John Brandon https://ift.tt/Cqs9ITV

I recently reviewed John Brandon’s Penalties of June, published in November 2024, and interviewed Brandon in early December. When we met outside the University of Georgia’s main library, I spotted him immediately in his black shirt and khakis. He’s quite tall and, as I learned upon introducing myself, soft-spoken in a way that suits his literary talent. Penalties, after all, is his sixth novel. 

John Brandon’s five previous novels are Arkansas, Citrus County, A Million Heavens, Further  Joy, Ivory Shoals. He has spent time as the Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and as the Tickner Writing Fellow at Gilman School, in Baltimore. His work has appeared in Oxford American, GQ, Grantland, ESPN the Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, and numerous literary journals. He teaches writing at Hamline University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We took a short walk through the rain together and got coffee – an Americano for me and an espresso with two sugars for him – in the basement of the UGA’s law library, then settled into some low-sitting chairs overlooking the library’s courtyard. The glass windows, mellow lighting, and hot drinks provided an excellent backdrop for a discussion of Brandon’s new noir-inspired thriller.

Penalties of June is set in Florida in the 1990s. What about that time and place holds your interest?

I have set things in Florida often. I’m from there. But I haven’t done right [by] where I’m from before. It always felt a little bit suffocating to know too much about a place, so I had never done it. But at some point, I thought, “I can do it now.” And everything about it was there for me, except the plot. For me, it’s easier to think about the characters. Plot . . . . I’ve got to sweat it out. Once I knew I was going to do Pasco, Hernando County – North Tampa Bay – then it was just a matter of starting to work on a plot. For the rest of it, I didn’t have to do research. It was just remembering the ’90s. 

I wrote this piece for LitHub that just came out. It’s about me noticing that, okay, your last book was in the 1860s, and this book is in the 1990s. And I’m realizing I don’t want to write a book that’s set today because everybody’s got their smartphone all the time, and can find out anything, and can communicate with anyone, and do anything they want with a phone, which makes it harder to plot. So I wrote an essay that’s thinking about that, and how I’m going to come to write something that takes place now. I was avoiding that by going back in time. 

I found the noir elements in Penalties of June to be very interesting. Can you say more about how noir influenced this book?

I definitely had noir in mind in a way that I never did before. I’ve done “crimey” stuff before, but I did want one point of view character like most of those noir books do, and instead of the character being a detective or a cop, it’s a regular person who winds up having to do those tasks, like staking someone out, doing research, solving a case. In this instance, [the protagonist] Pratt’s trying to figure out how not to do the things he’s been told to do, and it leads him into these activities that are detective-like. I definitely had noir in mind, and I knew it wouldn’t be urban or shadowy. I’m calling it a “sunlight noir.” It’s got the elements of noir, but it’s in Florida, and it’s in the daytime, and the sun beating down on you all the time is a problem. 

One of my favorite characters in the book is Roger, a bookish and stoic character who works for the crime boss, Bonne. What inspired him?

I’m not going to be able to remember exactly what inspired him, but I know that there’s no conception of Roger or of [Roger’s partner] Nairn without thinking of the other. These two are partners, so I’m going to make them different. Let’s be honest, Roger’s just a better person than Nairn. You can guess what the plan is as far as the evil forces, like what the plan is for Roger. Pratt is trying to weigh “how loyal should I be? What’s the point of this? What’s going to be the reward?” And he sees these two examples in Nairn and Roger. But to answer your question, I’ve got these two characters, and I make them different, and then it’s just fun to go as extreme as you can with it. So, Nairn isn’t just rough around the edges. He’s really a redneck jerk. Roger’s smarter and reads for a hobby. I don’t see why not push it; make their characters more vivid and extreme. 

Music comes up a lot in the book, mostly with references to “glam metal” and classic rock. How much does music, or your musical tastes, impact your writing?

That’s a tough one, because I think the choices are made instance to instance. What’s funny is that the book is in the 90s, but all that music that you just mentioned is not from the 90s. I did the same thing with a character from Arkansas. I feel like these loners, out of step with the zeitgeist – they’re not listening to the music everyone else is. If he goes over to his high school friend Tony’s house, for instance, Tony’s going to be listening to De La Soul. It’s from then, and that’s the music people who are “with it” at that point will be listening to, and Pratt will never have heard of that. When you’re with Pratt, he’s behind 10, 20 years on the music. But I also like taking the choice away from the character. They don’t get to choose. So when he gets the music, it’s just whatever tapes Tony has. To me, that’s almost a comedic choice when you think about what would be the most annoying thing to get stuck with. It’s either “candy pop,” or something like hair metal. But hair metal’s worse because it’s louder.

Baseball is also really important to Pratt. What inspired that decision?

I played sports as a kid, and I think there’s definitely this thing of, if you used to be really good at something, you have to get over yourself once you’re a little older because you’re not as good at it anymore. Baseball is a sport I didn’t play, and maybe it’s me being over cautious and not wanting to over-indulge myself. This is why I didn’t use soccer, which was my main sport. So I chose baseball. Baseball’s also wholesome, and in the 90s, was still the “American sport.” So Tony’s asking Pratt to play baseball, and the reader knows Pratt’s making a mistake by saying “no.” And Pratt would also be doing this thing that he associates with a better time, when his dead friend Matty was around. He never played baseball when he was in prison, and that’s just his rule now. Tony’s going to have to wear him down and wear him down to get him to do what I think the reader knows he should do. 

Pratt seems hesitant to embrace technology. If Pratt were here today, how do you see him adapting to the technological landscape?

You’re asking about his fundamental flexibility. I feel like he has some, but he might be similar to me. More than any character I’ve ever written, even though Pratt’s experiences are totally different from mine, I felt like when he makes decisions, that’s what I would have done. A lot of his character traits are ones that I have, maybe not as strongly or not as tested as his. I feel like my relationship with that stuff is that I will resist it as long as I can until it’s just not worth it anymore, and then I won’t resist it. It is an interesting question, because it seems like what Pratt is up against all the time. If he can identify the morally right thing to do, how does he balance that with staying alive?

Earlier, we talked about Flannery O’Connor. What about her continues to excite you, and are there any other writers, past or present, who have influenced your work?

It comes down to the same thing: there’s stuff that you really like about a writer that can inspire you, but also, you can only write like yourself. I love Joy Williams, and I went through a phase where I felt like I was trying to write like her, and it doesn’t work that way. You wind up thinking about what you admire about their rhythms, and the way they’re going about things, and just let it sink in and see what happens. When I was young, I’d read a bunch of one person, like Hemingway, and then I’d try to write like Hemingway. It doesn’t work, but what does work is, five years later, you’ve let the sensibility sink in. 

With Flannery O’Connor, I’m so far from being able to do what she does with a short story. She’s one of those writers that’s just great with a story. That’s where she shines. I can never do that, and that’s why I don’t have chapters in my books. I just can’t get my brain to work that way, where it feels resolved, almost as if you could take it out of the book, read this chapter, and feel satisfied. It might have even set me back a little, reading her and thinking “oh, I’ve got to write stories like this.” I don’t feel like I wrote stories that I liked until much later, when I wasn’t trying to write these amazing stories that will live forever like Flannery O’Connor did. When I read her, it’s just so crystal clear. The rhythm is perfect. There’s nothing extra, but it’s also not skimpy. She knows what she wants to do and is so generous about it. The characters always say the right thing. They always say enough. It’s the same thing when you read Joy Williams, or Tom Drury, or Padgett Powell: every sentence is exactly how it needs to be. Just to have that in mind, that you’re not just clunking content down. You’re writing sentences, and each one plays off the other. Eventually, I had to take that, but do it the way I write. 

What are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading a Barbara Kingsolver novel called Unsheltered. I just read Lucy Corin’s book The Swank Hotel. That was really interesting, too. I stopped at Lauren Groff’s bookstore in Gainesville, and I knew I was going to get Arcadia, because that’s one of hers I haven’t read. 

Let’s talk about your publisher, McSweeney’s. 

They took my first book when I didn’t have an agent. They read the beginning and read the rest, and I really am grateful to them for getting me started. I’ve had a lot of fun with them. In the early days, after Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s, it felt sort of punk rock in a good way. My first tour, for Arkansas, I had a sword swallower as my opening act. I think they’ll be around and keep doing their good work. I like to tell people that McSweeney’s is an independent publisher. It’s not part of an international conglomerate.

The first novel I wrote was mostly in grad school, which I tried to get an agent for and couldn’t. And next, I wrote Arkansas, and I still couldn’t get an agent, but McSweeney’s took it. With the next one, which was Citrus County, I thought “I’ll get an agent now,” because I’d already published a book. I still didn’t, but McSweeney’s took that one, too. And for Citrus County, there was a big, great review in the New York Times Book Review. Daniel Handler very kindly wrote that review, and after that, several agents contacted me, which was surreal. Then, I got to choose which agent I vibed with. It was a strange experience. Now, I’ve had the same agent, and we get along great. Maybe I’ll be with McSweeney’s forever.

FICTION
Penalties of June
By John Brandon
McSweeney’s
Published November 26, 2024