Fifty-three-year-old Benjamin Ford finds himself stranded for hours in O’Hare Airport on his way to his estranged daughter’s lesbian wedding in California. Out of sheer desperation, he picks up a pen and starts writing a letter to the airline, demanding his money back.
This letter is the clever conceit that shapes Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles’ debut novel. The “letter” turns out to be a tightly composed, 180-page story, a mixture of complaint and confessional, at turn hilarious and heartbreaking. This is not your classic summer read (whatever that is), but I unequivocally recommend it for fans of contemporary adult fiction who like their novels about equal parts humorous and poignant (and for those not interested at the moment in epics).
The book’s structure allows Miles to rant directly to the airline, describe the horrors of an overnight airport stay and — most crucial — write a rambling bio of Bennie Ford in long digressions that lay out a tale of regret, despair and possible redemption. As it turns out, Bennie was a bad drunk, bad husband and bad father. But somehow Bennie’s not a bad guy.
Miles prose is dense but not flowery; he balances out his longer riffs with tossed-out lines that lend a conversational air. Here’s a passage I especially like:
The worst part of sobriety is the silence. The lonesome, pressurized silence. Like the way sound falls away when you’re choking. Even when I drank alone, the vodka provided me with a kind of soundtrack — a rhythm, channeled voices, a brain crowded with noise and streaming color, the rackety blurred color of decrepitude. At the meetings everyone talks about how much more vivid life is without the booze, but I think, though I never say, that vivid is the wrong word. Life is rather more clear.
Dear American Airlines is loaded with insights like these, all the while evoking a narrator that you end up liking in spite of yourself.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2008.