The perfect novel for your next plane trip

books:


	• Dear American Airlines: A Novel Jonathan Miles Houghton Mifflin Co, 2008 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What's in a thought.

Even while feeling the anger and frustration of flight cancellations, it is not enough just to write to American Airlines for a refund. All the now conscious thinking regarding the consequences, or imagined consequences of this predicament, are coming to mind.

Trying to stay busy in an airport by doing some translating work becomes interspersed with the imagined emotional responses of this flight cancellation. Boored behavior exhibits itself.

I find it fascinating to read how a mind can jump from one subject to another--although we all do this all day, every day.

Scary thing, the mind.

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The perfect novel for your next plane trip

Imagine having the plane to your daughter's wedding canceled . . . you
wouldn't be happy camper . . . in fact, you might even write a complaint
letter.

That's the premise behind DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES, a funny but sad
first novel by Jonathan Miles . . . his main character, Bennie Ford, winds
up trapped in Chicago's O'Hare airport.

So he starts writing a letter--one that never ends . . . it actually runs
the full length of the book (some 180 pages) and covers a wide range
of subjects, including the joys of sitting in the waiting area chairs:

* Enclosed please find my sciatic nerve. Due to the wear and tear
on it from hours upon hours in this miserable fu*king O'Hare
seating--these patent-pending O'Chairs--I am sending it to you for speedy
repair. A return envelope is also enclosed, which you may address to me
care of the wheelchair bank across from Gate K8, Chicago, Ill.

I also got a kick out of how Bernie's mind rambled to include
the facility's bathrooms:

* For the past ten minutes or so, among other activities, I've been pondering why
airport bathrooms hardly ever feature graffiti. Truckstop bathrooms serve much
the same purpose--as pitstops for travelers on the go--yet their walls are
almost always festooned with rich commentary. Jesus saves! (The rejoinder:
But Satan invests.) Don't look for a joke here, it's in your hand. Please don't
toss cigarette butts in the toilet, it makes them hard to light. John 3:16.
(Rejoinder: Matthew 3:20--just missed you.) Etc. And my personal favorite,
which I saw scrawled on a condom machine in an Allentown, PA, truckstop:
Insert baby for refund.

That last one actually had me laughing out loud . . . good thing I wasn't
in an airport, in that the folks there would have probably wondered
about me.

The author even came up with such investment ideas as the following:

*It occurs to me that those whizbang handheld slot machines might
be a good investment for you. Here's how it would work:
Passengers would be handed one of the machines with their boarding
pass. At the gate, thirty minutes prior to the scheduled departure,
everyone would have to take a spin at the very same time. If everyone
hits jackpot simultaneously, a massive cheer goes up and the plane
departs on time. If not, they wait one hour and try again. The upside for
you is that we passengers would bemoan our bad luck rather than
castigate you. Fate would get the blame, not the poor attendants
who in this scenario will just shrug and smile and bid us better
luck next time. Your planes would take off at about their normal rate
but the populist heat would be diverted. See? I offer this idea to you
gratis though you should feel encouraged to cite me in the press release.
It would make my mother so proud to see me in the business pages.
In fact, here's my quote: " 'Americans love gambling, but their main
form of gambling--heading to the airport--has been flagrantly rigged
for years,' said Benjamin Ford, a transportation consultant who
devised the system for the Texas-based airline. 'The Jackpot Take-Off
from American Airlines is a game of pure chance, and takes the flying
game out of corporate hands and delivers it into the hands of the
people.' " Tweak as needed, and you're welcome.

What a concept!

And what a book DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES is . . . it's the perfect
thing to read on your next plane trip.

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A bumpy flight

This book surprised me. It is written in an ironic complaining voice, funny but not terribly moving. As I read on, however, I was captured by the injured life that unfolded. What more can you ask of a novel. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry.

Brilliant...

Benny Miles is 53, single and a failed poet who now translates Polish novels.

"The last poem I published was in 1965; the last poem I wrote, not counting the ditty above, came maybe a year later. It would be false modesty to say no one noticed though just barely. Mostly, it was an amicable split. That great old line of Larkin's - `I haven't given up poetry; poetry has given me up' - doesn't apply here. No, exhausted from decades of quarreling, we each gave up on the other."

He is a recovering alcoholic who is twice-divorced - the first being a "shot-gun marriage" after hot summer fling with Stella who learned she was pregnant - the second marriage lasting shorter than the blink of an eye. Stella dumped the boozing, "searching" Benny and took their infant daughter Stella (aka as Speck) and moved to California to live with her Parents. Told him that she'd had it with the lack of love in the marriage and his indifference to her and to Speck. Benny has minimal contact with his daughter. Years later, Speck invites Benny to her wedding - Benny accepts in an effort to reconcile and make amends. He buys a $392.86 ticket on American Airlines. The flight is re-routed to Peoria for inexplicable reasons and he has to bus to O'Hare to catch his connecting flight. The flight is rescheduled for the next day putting him on the edge of being late for one of his daughter's most important life events - on the cusp of failing to be there for her yet once again - while he is stranded with thousands of other hostile and disgruntled passengers pleading to catch an earlier flight.

There are 4 plot lines weaved in this thin 180-page novel:

1) Benny writing a complaint letter to American Airlines and waiting at O'Hare trying to catch the next flight. (1/6 of the novel)

2) Benny writing about his parents, his Father a holocaust survivor turned mechanic and his Mother a "case for a psychological bomb squad."

"They were less parents than cellmates and we all privately marked off the days of our confinement. My father won this grim contest by dying when I was fifteen - the victim of an unexpected heart attack that struck him in his sleep. For so sudden a death, and at a such a pregnable age for me, it was a strangely unemotional passing. He was only forty-eight but his death felt like that of a nursing home patient who'd been bedridden and cancer-racked for year: an act of mercy, a gift rather than a theft. I don't even remember even crying at his funeral. I felt as if I was waving goodbye as he embarked upon a new and better adventure. Send me a postcard, Tata. Be brave."

3)Benny's marriage to Stella and the birth of their daughter.

4) Benny translating a Polish Novel called "The Free State of Trieste" - a story about a soldier (Walenty) who is hit with a mortar shell and treated by an incompetent surgeon leading to his leg being amputated. The solider is recovering from the trauma and trying to find his way home to Poland when he encounters other situations beyond his control. While Walenty seemingly is battered by forces outside of his control, Benny wrestles with whether he made bad choices and was perhaps too indifferent about key relationships (Stella & Speck) which he now regrets. Both are seeking a better way forward in life.

"You can't escape what you are be it possum or poet. Maybe you get what you get. Or as the old saw goes: You buy your ticket, you take your chance."

Overall, my assessment of the book:

1) Beware: "R" rated (coarse language, sexual content)

2) Brilliant writing. Hard to imagine this is his first book. Author is able to weave highly intelligent rambling into slapstick, wit, humor, cynicism, sarcasm and heart breaking/tugging moments - trading 4 story lines listed above like alternatively eating sugar and lemon and back again.

3) If you've ever been stranded at O'Hare, Miles will place you there as if you sat with him in an overnight layover - capturing the environment, the mood, the shops, the security, the agonizing wait in uncomfortable chairs.

4) The book is 180-pages but dense. Not necessarily a page turner. The injection of the plot line regarding Walenty in the Polish to English translation may be too ambitious (or too much) for a short 180 page book - therein lies my 4 rating instead of a 5.

The book is worthy...

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Sometimes the planes don't fly on time.

Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent wasted, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie writes in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent groundnote of regret for the actions of a lifetime -- and made all the more urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right.

A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor, vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, Dear American Airlines gives new meaning to the term "airport novel" and announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction.

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