Bookreporter.com - DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES by Jonathan Miles

DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES
Jonathan Miles
Mariner Books
Fiction
Hardcover: 9780547054018
Paperback: 9780547237909

This summer you may find yourself at the mercy of the airline industry, paying high prices and risking canceled flights. Or you may opt for train or car travel and long for a good book to absorb yourself in as the landscape rolls by the windows. Even if you plan to stay at home this vacation season, DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES, Jonathan Miles’s debut novel, will satisfy your desire for a slim and funny but also quite thoughtful read.

Bennie Ford, an aging alcoholic poet who makes his living translating Polish literature into English, is angry. His daughter is getting married, and he is stuck at O'Hare Airport. Between bouts of working on his latest translation, a depressing post-war tale by his friend Alojzy, he writes a letter to American Airlines, meaning to express his displeasure at being stranded by the canceled flight. The letter becomes, however, both a screed and lament. He rails against the injustices he suffered while wallowing in guilt over his mostly wasted life. His letter is full of righteous indignation and regret but is very witty as well.

Raised by an eccentric couple, a beautiful schizophrenic and a quiet Polish immigrant who survived a German concentration camp, Bennie grows up with romantic notions but allows them to be drowned in alcohol. His relationship with Stella is passionate, brief and doomed, leaving him a heartbroken young father. His daughter, also named Stella but whom he calls Speck, grows up without him. But a wedding invitation stirs up decades of feelings and memories, and, stuck in the airport, he has plenty of time to write it all down.

From his humid and eccentric New Orleans childhood, to a carefree and artistic year in Poland, from his failings as a partner and father to his middle age spent with his ailing mother, Bennie's letter is his confession and autobiography. The sights and sounds of the airport distract him from his tale (but add much-needed comic relief for readers), and his work on Alojzy's book, excerpted throughout, provide a story within a story challenging us to find (not always apparent) parallels between Bennie and the main character.

Like a comedic Charles Bukowski, Bennie knows he is his own worst enemy. He has been traumatized by life mostly because of his own horrible choices. As a translator he finds philosophic and poetic justice: taking the ideas, the work, even the successes of others and putting his own creative, if mostly invisible and unacknowledged, energy into them. With this letter he puts it all on the line: his boozy mistakes, his selfish love, his hope, his belief in transformation and change, and what poetry is left in him. This letter is Bennie Ford's masterpiece, but his dream is to make it to his daughter's wedding.

In DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES, Bennie starts out angry and frustrated, but by the end of the book, and letter, he is feeling much better and hopeful for a second chance. Miles's first novel is a quick and wild read full of great American themes like redemption, heartbreak, struggle and movement. He has succeeded in writing a very readable book with a unique format. Bennie's tale is at once familiar and surprising, and this summer readers will want to be trapped with Bennie in the airport as he shares his poignant and entertaining tale of losing it all and finding oneself.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

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