Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547237901
• ISBN13: 9780547237909
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Trapped in a Good Way

I could stay trapped with Benjamin R. Ford anywhere, anytime, to soak up his insights and enjoy his rants. "Dear American Airlines" is essentially an appeal for order and civility wrapped around a memoir about regret and lost opportunities. Bennie Ford is in purgatory, in this case O'Hare International Airport. Due to weather, he's stuck. Due to his own past mistakes, he has left behind a broken trail of tears and disappointments. Facing the possibility he won't be able to attend his daughter's wedding, Bennie Ford takes the time to write it all down. It turns out O'Hare isn't purgatory--it's one giant confessional. Sound bleak? It's not. Jonathan Miles gives Bennie Ford a lively mix of humor and self-analysis. The pages zip along. It's not really a wedding he's going to--he can't call it that since he's discovered his daughter is marrying a woman named Sylvana. He notes that he is "one letter away" from being kin to a TV set. It helps that Ford is an ex-poet so he has the license to write with so much color and imagination. Among the references to writers and artists -- Dante (naturally), Bukowski, Sylvia Plath (another good choice), Leo Tolstoy, Stephen Stills (!) and John Cale. It also helps that Ford's profession is as a translator so he can also relay the details of a novel about a Polish soldier returning from Italy, which merges niftily with the main theme at the end. (Although, as Ford notes, "you have to be careful about making connections in this world.") "Dear American Airlines" is chock full of Ford breaking down various highlights from the movie of his life. It's also a series of riffs on a variety of topics; there are more subjects than there are gates at O'Hare. If you have never stopped to wonder why there is no graffiti in airport bathrooms, "Dear American Airlines" will give you the chance. It's also a deep story of love and loss, about destiny and control. There is melancholy and sentiment within Ford's rage--he's too keen an observer to be endlessly gruff. "Self-mythology, like drinking fourteen hours a day, will eventually grind you into residue," he concludes. (It's clear Ford was quite the drinker, but the even the familiar "recovering alcoholic" themes are fresh in Miles' hands.) Highly recommended for its structure--many free-form rants within a tightly scripted gaze in the rearview mirror of life. Also highly recommended for the terrific word choice and effortless writing style.

A Great Read!

This is definitely one of my favorites. It never becomes cliche even though it touches upon common themes. I had such mixed feelings about Bennie -- he is generally unlikable, occasionally disgusting yet somehow I want to root for him -- to ultimately see him redeemed. I travel quite a bit and have experienced first hand some of the emotions and frustration or prolonged delays. But I could never put it into the perfect words like Jonathan Miles has. I also believe this is a book that men will like as it is definitely not "chick lit." What surprises me is that it is not front and center in every airport bookstore. A missed revenue opportunity for sure.

Players and painted stage took all my love/And not those things that they were emblems of

Or so wrote Yeats and that line pretty much describes Bennie Ford, always one or two steps removed from living life. That's his life and his profession(Miles makes him a translator). Ex-wife Stella could not agree more: " (you) are always drawn to the frozen image...not the real thing" or as she accuses Bennie of treating her and their child as "moveable props" and laments that "I never understood why life was never enough for you." (Actually Bennie as a college student edits a poem zine called "Rag and Bone Shop" which is a line that comes from one of Yeats' last poems-- The Circus Animals' Desertion. The title of this review is a line from that poem.Read the poem before the novel and you'll appreciate the novel more.) Bennie is stuck in Chicago with a huge flight delay foul up. He is mid way between the country, leaving his home in New York to attend his estranged daughter's wedding in LA. But the midpoint is not just geographic, it is metaphorical. He is equiposed between life and death(he contemplates suicide), stradled in declining middle age(a life of hard drinking does that to you), sorting out how he got to be the way he is(mentally ill mother, stolid immigrant Polish father, growing up in the South). The complaint letter is a funny and effective device for Bennie's internal monologue. And the beauty of this book is to see and feel and hear as Bennie works it out and answers this question---will I go forward or will I go back or will I just stay the same. The novel teaches us a lot as he struggles with the answer. Miles has a fresh way with the language"I felt as if I was having a pimple squeezed"(describing a clincally administered h/j) and 'to translate a literary work is to make love to a woman who will always be in love with someone else". The novel is only a 180 pages but Miles packs a lot into it. Give it a read.

brilliantly written humor

This is probably the funniest book I have ever read. My stomach ached from the laugher----page after page of aches. I am an avid reader, so I don't say lightly, "This book is more than five stars. Add at least two, maybe three." It is brilliant writing. I see others have given summaries--and rated it as less. Did they really read the same book I wonder. I teach writing to college students. This will be a book I use to show them brilliant writing. Jonathan Miles--an encore please!

When a flight is cancelled, let your imagination fly

Benjamin Ford, the protagonist of this novel, is flying from New York to Los Angeles to attend his daughter Stella's wedding. But in transit, at the O'Hare airport, his connecting flight is suddenly cancelled, stranding him. He begins to worry that he will be late for the wedding. While waiting for more than eight hours at the air port - and smoking seventeen cigarettes - for the next flight, he starts writing a letter of complaint to the American Airlines, demanding a refund of $392.68, the price of the round trip airfare. This letter of complaint grows in length, and matures into a funny, witty, mesmerizing novel. Benjamin, middle-aged, is a poet and writer; he translates Polish novels into English. While writing the letter of complaint, he ponders about his failed marriages, his misdirected and ruined life, the time he wasted drinking heavily, his estranged daughter, his bed-ridden mother and the cramped apartment he shares with her. He also dwells on Walenty Mozelewski, the protagonist of the novel "The Free State of Trieste," which he has been translating from Polish. Walenty has lost a leg to mortar shell in a war, and so he is physically crippled. Benjamin is crippled too; he is emotionally crippled, a victim mostly of self-inflicted wounds. When someone you know begins to whine, generally you would try to get away from the whiner at the very first chance you get. But the author's whining here, in the form of a very long letter of complaint, I read as if I were glued to my seat, forgetting even to reach for my cup of coffee in the microwave. This novel is funny, witty, acerbic, and at times vitriolic, mesmerizing, hilarious, hypnotic, dazzling, sad, and in turn heart-breaking and very touching, all at once! How did Jonathan Miles accomplish this feat? Through the flight of his imagination and magic of his pen, I suppose. Written in lively, abrasive, masculine, snappy, and yet strangely affecting prose, this book will delight, provoke, entertain and sadden the reader: "In that eightish-hour period I've smoked seventeen cigarettes which wouldn't be notable save for the fact that the dandy Hudson News outlets here don't stock my brand so I'll soon be forced to switch to another, and while that shouldn't upset me it does. In fact, it enrages me. Here's my life in dangly tatters and I can't even enjoy this merest of my pleasures. Several hours ago a kid in a Cubs windbreaker bummed one of mine and I swear if I spy him again I'll smash him like a Timex. Cough it up, you turd. But then all this talk of smoking is giving me the familiar itch, so if you'll excuse me for a moment I'm off to the sidewalk, as required by law, to scratch it." It is very rare to come across a first novel as charming and impressive as this. Jonathan Miles is an astonishing writer.