Dear American Airlines

Dear American Airlines,You may be interested to know that a man named Jonathan Miles has penned a novel that purports to be a letter of complaint to your airline from a man whose flight was cancelled. This missed flight changes Bennie Ford's whole life. Narrator Mark Bramhall quotes the letter, with all its humor and amusing commentary. Clearly, the missed plane is a metaphor for Ford's sad, screwed-up life, which includes a failed marriage and stalled career. Bramhall is so good at storytelling that it's easy to see how the letter can be interpreted as something more than a complaint about a flubbed flight. Instead of complaining about the airline mishap, Ford should be thanking your airline for giving him the opportunity to rethink his life. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

February 18, 2008
This crisp yowl of a first novel from Miles, who covers books for Men's Journal
and cocktails for the New York Times
, finds despairing yet effusive litterateur Benjamin Ford midair in midlife crisis. Bennie is en route from New York, where he shares a cramped apartment with his stroke-disabled mother and her caretaker, to L.A., where he will attend his daughter Stella's wedding. He gets stranded at O'Hare when his connecting flight—along with all others—is unaccountably canceled. In the long, empty hours amid a marooned crowd, Bennie's demand for a refund quickly becomes a scathing yet oddly joyful reflection on his difficult life, and on the Polish novel he is translating. Bennie writes lightly of his “dark years” of drinking, of his failed marriages, about his mother's descent into suicidal madness and about her marriage to Bennie's father, a survivor of a Nazi labor camp. Bennie's father recited Polish poetry for solace during Bennie's childhood, inadvertently setting Bennie's life course; Bennie's command of language as he describes his fellow strandees and his riotous embrace of his own feelings will have readers rooting for him. By the time flights resume, Miles has masterfully taken Bennie from grim resignation to the dazzling exhilaration of the possible.