'Dear American Airlines' by Jonathan Miles
BOOK REVIEW
A stranded passenger at O'Hare, reflecting on a failed life, tells American Airlines perhaps more than it wants to know.
TALK about timing: In April, American Airlines grounded more than 1,000 flights, many of them out of Chicago, to check electrical connections on its fleet of MD-80s. Two months later, Jonathan Miles has published his first novel, "Dear American Airlines," written in the form of a letter from a disgruntled flier stranded at O'Hare, waiting, like Vladimir and Estragon, to be delivered from the existential nightmare of the terminal.
If you've ever been in such a situation -- and at this point, let's face it, who hasn't? -- "Dear American Airlines" will provoke all sorts of uneasy recognition. Yet Miles' novel is more than a harangue about the degradation of air travel; it's a heartfelt exploration of one man's psychic deterioration and the slim reed of hope to which, miraculously, he still clings.
That's important, for "Dear American Airlines" is a gimmick novel, which we approach with a certain suspension of disbelief. Even the most despairing passenger, after all, would never write a 180-page complaint to customer service, nor would he reveal in it everything about himself: the refund request as public confessional.
Yet the concept works beautifully. "It's clear I should've been a Russian novelist," Miles' narrator, Benjamin Ford, reckons: "I can't even write a . . . refund request without detailing my lineage" -- and this sense of play, of pushing the boundaries, resonates throughout the book.
More to the point is the notion of the novel as an act of grievance, directed not just at the airline but at the world. Ford is stuck in Chicago on his way from New York to Los Angeles for his daughter's wedding; as the hours pass, he misses first the prenuptial dinner and then the ceremony.
For Ford, however, this is perhaps the least of it. His life is an ongoing series of missed connections, of might-have-beens and never-weres. ("You look in the mirror one morning and realize: That face, this life, these weren't my intention.") His long letter to American, then, is among other things an attempt to make amends.
Ford, of course, has much to make amends for -- a collapsed marriage, an abandoned daughter, a second-rate career as a translator after his first career, as a poet, failed to pan out. He's a recovering alcoholic with a tendency toward self-destruction, living with his deteriorating mother in a small apartment in New York.
