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47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When a flight is cancelled, let your imagination fly, June 3, 2008
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.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Witnessing A Disgruntled Air Traveler on the Verge of a Catharsis, June 30, 2008
For anyone who has been disgruntled by American Airlines' massive service disruption recently and the general malaise of the flight industry as a whole, this is a dexterously comic and surprisingly poignant first-time novel that will resonate. Jonathan Miles, a freelance magazine writer who has an enviable job as the cocktails columnist for The New York Times, has penned a story that takes the form of an exasperated and ultimately cathartic 180-page letter of complaint from Benjamin ("Bennie") Ford, a passenger demanding a full refund of $392.68 as he remains stranded at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a concentration of congestion aptly described as "the sacrificial goat of air travel". What has triggered his scathing indictment is that a cancelled flight has meant he will miss the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding.
The situation is complicated by the fact that his daughter is gay, that the wedding is really a commitment ceremony and that he hasn't seen her since she was an infant. The reasons for the dysfunctional nature of the relationship are delved into by the sharp-tongued author as Bennie reveals himself as an alcoholic ex-poet and ex-bartender from New Orleans, the product of a schizophrenic painter mother and a Polish immigrant who ended up becoming an exterminator. He went through two failed marriages and now cares for his mother in a New York apartment as he earns a living as a translator of Polish fiction. Bennie's translation-in-progress is called "The Free State of Trieste", and it runs parallel with his own story. Miles goes back and forth between the epic tale of an injured Polish soldier in the aftermath of World War II and Bennie's own frustrating saga.
What is most relatable in the book is the way the author covers the expected inconveniences of flying, whether it's the burden of post-9/11 security or the idle time chatting with fellow stranded travelers. The minutiae of Bennie's experience can start to feel repetitive at times, but I have to admit the best parts of the book are Bennie waxing philosophically as he rants to the poor American Airlines customer service agent to whom his letter is directed. Sometimes it comes across like a more thoughtful and thought-provoking version of Neil Simon's The Out-of-Towners. But more than that, what Miles does especially well is take a well-worn literary archetype - the bad father and husband seeking forgiveness - and turned him into a fresh, complex character worth discovering. The brief story evolves into a direction that is both bittersweet and satisfying, no small feat for a rookie novelist with obvious talent to burn.
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62 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "WE KNOW YOU HAD A CHOICE OF AIRLINES..."BUH-BUY"!", July 5, 2008
The first thing prospective readers should know, is that even though the story places the protagonist/author Benjamin "Benny" Ford in O'Hare Airport, eighty-percent of the story has nothing to do with the agonies of a delayed flight. As a constant nationwide traveler myself, when I heard about this book, I immediately imagined unlimited humorous plots and sub-plots all at the expense of the un-caring Airline industry and its echoing tentacles that encompass security, parking, bathrooms, etc. I envisioned myself (and other travelers like me) laughing, yelling, and pointing accusatory fingers at the hapless and sadistic airline characters portrayed in the book as I shrieked: "I told you I wasn't the only one who asked for a pillow"... "I wasn't the only one who wondered why the airlines wouldn't tell you where your connecting gates were located as the plane is pulling into a gate"... "or betting the passenger seated next to me that the attendant they promised would be waiting at the gate to help you with connections wouldn't be there..." etc. As I said, maybe twenty-per-cent of the story relates to the actual flight and airport.
But what the author does do, very intelligently and cleverly, is use the excuse of a delayed flight to start writing a letter to American Airlines to ask for his $392.68 to be refunded, since during the delay he figured he would not be able to get to Los Angeles in time for his daughter's wedding. His flight which started in New York and was supposed to have a forty-five minute layover in Chicago, instead was forced to land in Peoria and taken by bus to O'Hare Airport where the delay lasted for indeterminable hours through the night. The letter starts off "requesting" a refund, but quickly changes to "demanding" a refund. And from there is where the author (through the letter) proceeds to tell his entire sordid life story, despite being stuck in an airport, which he returns the reader to not frequently enough. Benny is a recovering alcoholic, failed poet, whose drinking ended his first marriage, which had produced the child whose wedding he is attempting to go to in Los Angeles, despite the fact that until he received the announcement, he hadn't seen or talked to his daughter since she was an infant and her mother grabbed her and fled in an attempt to escape the alcoholic destruction that Benny called a life. Along with the date and location of the wedding, Benny also was informed that his estranged daughter was marrying a woman.
If you have ever met a person at a bar or at a party, who is not only drunk, but "amped-up" on cocaine or any type of speed, and by simply saying hello, you have activated a non-stop-high-speed, at times extremely interesting and somewhat amusing, story of their life... but every decade or so of his story... he veers off the road... or takes the wrong off ramp... or finds (to him) interesting tangents that may involve a blemish on the wall... well... if you have... then the author's writing style will seem familiar to you. Don't get me wrong, there are some lyrically beautiful and cleverly written passages such as the first time he talks on the phone to his adult daughter: "WE LAUGHED TOGETHER AT THAT ONE, WHICH FELT GOOD - A SQUIRT OF OIL IN THE DECAYED AND RUSTED JOINTS OF OUR BOND." Or after he received the invitation in the mail which was the first connection between Father and daughter since infancy: "...AS IF I'D FOUND THE PALE CRUMB OF A TRAIL LEADING BACK TO MY LIFE. "Or after the first phone call between them had ended he summarized to himself: "AT TIMES OUR CONVERSATION WAS SO LIGHT AND EASY THAT IT DISTURBED ME; WITH THAT MUCH WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, IT, WAS HARD TO BELIEVE THE BRIDGE COULD STILL BE STANDING." What derails the adrenaline fueled poetry is the author periodically (actually a little more than periodic) changing gears completely by leaving the currently discussed time and place crisis in his life story, and then he starts TRANSLATING A POLISH BOOK about Walenty Mozelewski and his war injury induced wooden leg.
This is obviously a very talented writer, but I feel wholeheartedly that this book could have been much better. He had a "sitting-duck" in the airline industry that he could have pulverized, but he barely touched them, and when the reader's emotions were vulnerable and in the palm of his hand, he would abruptly switch to Polish translation regarding Walenty and his wooden leg.
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I'm one of those readers who can't get enough of Martin Amis novels, since Amis--a savage misanthrope who sometimes writes, it seems, with a drill bit--is a guilty pleasure of mine from way back. So it's no wonder that I fell so hard for the bitter, hilarious, dark, twisted, and wonderfully written delights of Dear American Airlines--the most Amis-like novel I've ever read. Jonathan Miles is a first-time novelist (and--full disclosure--friend of mine) whose journalism I've long admired for its clear, humane prose. I never suspected that he had a book like this in him, and--frankly--now that I do know, I'm a little worried for his mental state (even as I'm totally impressed with his writing.)
