Later, in the middle of a domestic dispute, he finds himself locked out of his apartment in the rain. He screams his wife's name only once before it hits him: "You simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment." Even in his despair, Bennie can't resist a good one-liner at his own expense. Admittedly, whether you enjoy this novel may depend on your tolerance for a certain stock literary "guy": the brawling and boozy tough-guy poet, a little too sensitive for today's world, a little too broken inside to hold together a relationship. The template for Bennie Ford might be well-worn, but Miles never falls into the cliched traps of drunken sentimentality or self-pity. Bennie's letter soon becomes something more, a sincere confession about his failures and regrets, charting the collapse from his early years as an aspiring poet and young father, to his divorce and estrangement from his family. He's a bad father and a miserable husband, but he doesn't flinch from the truth of it. As readers, we admire his honesty and his righteous anger at modern life and modern airports. And in the end, Bennie is blessed with a moment of redemption, a touch of grace for a man stuck in O'Hare's interminable purgatory.
'Dear American Airlines' has perfect timing
The book is a novel-length complaint letter written by one angry
American Airlines passenger who has been stranded in Chicago's
O'Hare International Airport and may miss his daughter's wedding in
Los Angeles.
Sound familiar? Just a few months ago, hundreds of thousands of
actual American Airlines customers were stranded in airports across
the country when the airline was forced to cancel 3,100 flights to
check or redo something called "wiring bundles." The universe, or
at least the Federal Aviation Administration, has apparently
gift-wrapped a marketing campaign just for this book.
So we can credit Miles, the cocktails columnist at The New York
Times, with excellent timing. But we can also credit him with a
sharp and funny first novel that will outlast the particular
troubles of the modern airline industry.
Bennie Ford's letter begins as a request - check that, a profane
demand - for a refund of his $392.68 ticket. He's desperately
trying to get to Los Angeles for the wedding of his estranged
daughter, whom he hasn't seen in years.
From the first paragraph, we hear Bennie's distinctive voice:
angry and outraged, literate and funny. If the canceled flight
weren't awful enough, he has to sit in a "maldesigned seat in this
maldesigned airport," a limbo without clocks or cigarettes, where
everyone seems to be playing sudoku, "the analgesic du jour of the
traveling class."
It may seem like faint praise to call a novel "funny," as if
laughter were a guilty pleasure in serious literature, something
enjoyable but slightly disreputable. But what good is satire
without humor? It shouldn't hurt Miles' reputation as a writer to
point out a simple fact: This book will make you laugh. Out loud
and repeatedly.
Bennie grew up in New Orleans, "where cirrhosis of the liver is
listed as 'Natural Causes' on a death certificate." Holding his
daughter in his arms for the first time, Bennie reflects, "She was
so beautiful and small - a gorgeous pink speck of life. But I
should also confess that I was drunk almost beyond recognition."