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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780547054018
ISBN number: 0547054017
Label: Houghton Mifflin Co
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Co
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: June 05, 2008
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin Co
Sale Popularity Level: 6106
Studio: Houghton Mifflin Co
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Product Description:
Sometimes the planes don't fly on time.
Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent wasted, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie writes in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent groundnote of regret for the actions of a lifetime -- and made all the more urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right.
A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor, vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, Dear American Airlines gives new meaning to the term 'airport novel' and announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction.
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Elizabeth Gilbert on Dear American Airlines
Elizabeth Gilbert's very first three books, Pilgrims, Stern Men, and the National Book Award nominee The Last American Man, received awards and acclaim, but her fourth, Eat, Pray, Love, a chronicle of her spiritual search and redemption following a difficult divorce, has put her on the bedside tables of millions of readers across the world. Her subsequent book, Weddings and Evictions, a memoir about her unexpected journey into second marriage, will be published in 2009.
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.)
The novel relays the tale of Bennie Ford, a man who is marinating like a cocktail olive in the sour middle-aged juices of his own mistakes, but who has decided to redeem himself completely by attending the wedding of his estranged daughter. Now, as some of us have learned from painful personal experience, it's not always easy to redeem a lifetime of screw-ups in one weekend, but that doesn't deter Bennie from heading to the airport to fly off to what he has decided is the most important event in his life. (The fact that he doesn't seem to notice that the wedding should actually be the most important event in his DAUGHTER'S life, not his, is an early clue of his particular breed of hilarious narcissism.) But at the airport is where his troubles begin, as American Airlines cancels his flight and thus--as far as he is concerned--destroys his life. What follows is a complaint letter raised to the level of high narrative art. I have never before encountered a novel written in the form of a complaint letter, and we can safely assume there will never be another such after this one, just because Miles has created an inimitable story here--one which, despite all the dark wit of its narrator--leaves room in the sad margins for real heartbreak, real feeling, real life. (This is something Amis himself wasn't able to do until many years into his career.) This is the most entertaining very first novel I've read in a long while, as well as a searing cautionary tale. Bring it to the airport with you subsequent time you fly somewhere to change your life...
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Rated by buyers 
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This book surprised me. It is written in an ironic complaining voice, funny but not terribly moving. As I read on, however, I was captured by the injured life that unfolded. What more can you ask of a novel. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry.
Rated by buyers 
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Ok, can we say too many unnecessary cuss words? It is not even likable. You can't even get past the front page without being assaulted with a cuss word in every sentence. Can't he tell his story without all that garbage? The story lacks character and plot that flows and captures the reader. It is boring and filled with unnecessary ramblings.
Rated by buyers 
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Not since I've read Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao" have I so enjoyed every minute of a book. So much story in this slim little volume! Bennie's story, his mother and father's, ex-wives, and Walenty, his character in the book he is translating, WoW! . Yes, it's dark, twisted, but hilarious with precisely drawn characters. I laughed and cried with poor Bennie. Like all of us, he is still trying to make sense of the world and his place in it at age 53. And despite the fact that he has been a party to life swirling him around its toilet bowl, he leaves us hopeful. Jonathan Miles is a brilliantly talented writer. I hope that he receives recognition for this fine novel. I am going to eagerly look to find everything else he has written and pray that we have more novels from him.
Rated by buyers -
Every writer who has been stranded in an airport is going to mutter "Why didn't I think of this?" when they pick up Jonathan Miles' epistolary very first novel. Dear American Airlines is not a book about the perils of commercial flight (although they play a supporting role here). It's a novel about the perils of modern life. Especially the perils of modern life with alcohol.
The protagonist, Benjamin Ford, is stranded in Chicago's O'Hare as he begins, but much of the narrative, a rant told largely in flashbacks, is set in New Orleans where he grew up and got his girlfriend, Stella, pregnant with a daughter, also named Stella, or Speck, the nickname he gave her when her conception was discovered and abortion was considered. He hasn't seen either of them since the older Stella kicked him out and moved to California with the baby twenty-something years ago. Now, little Stella, whom he boozily promised he would walk down the aisle on her wedding day, is getting married to a woman named Syl, and Bennie is determined to be there.
I read Bennie's attempts to deal with unmanageable air traffic problems as a metaphor for his many years of struggling to manage alcohol without giving it up. But Bennie is sober now, down to his last vice of cigarettes, and we learn of his childhood with Miss Willa, his mother who now lives with her adult child, and his father, Henryk Gneich, a survivor of Dachau who died when Bennie was a teenager. From his father he got his love of poetry and the language of Poland, from which he makes his living. His mother, in many ways, has been a child both he and his father had to care for. But she loves Bennie, and she continues to show it as she writes brief messages to him on Post-its.
Miles covers much of the ground familiar to readers of memoir from James Frey and Augustin Burroughs, but he's far more disciplined. Part of the impact of this novel is that he manages to convey a lifetime of love and suffering into 180 pages. Miles writes about cocktails for the New York Times, but so tenderly does he write from Bennie's point of view that it's hard to believe he's not a recovering alcoholic. Either way, this is one impressive fiction debut.
Rated by buyers 
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this story was long and boring to me, even when skimming through the polish translation pages, which didn't seem to lead anywhere, i was bored by the self-absorbed former addict. The words were there, but the feelings never reached me. Spurts of the past, interspersed with cigarette breaks...felt like having one myself. I kept trying because I had heard so many good reviews of it, but it never arrived for me.
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