You should be able to read at least a book every other week, right (okay, so that's twenty-six – give me a little break here)? Well, let's find out this year.
Dear American Airlines (amazon.com or borders.com) is a short novel in the form of a complaint letter to American Airlines. That, by itself, would make a great start, but Jonathon Miles turns the premise into bad tempered, but hilarious, gold. The narrator/author of the poison pen letter to American is stuck at O'Hare in Chicago on his was to his estranged daughter's wedding. When the flight is cancelled, his one chance to reconnect with his past – and atone for some of that past – is lost. Hopeless adrift in the airport he reflects on his life as a failed poet, middling translator of middling Polish literature, and hopeless husband and father. It's the voice that Miles conjures up: so hopeful at the prospect of meeting his adult daughter, so hopeless as the airport clock inexorably makes the meeting impossible. While it's a short novel, the voice given to Bennie is unique in its anger, regret and wit. The idea that a complaint letter would be the foundation of a regretful look back at a life that could have been better (not interrupted, delayed) is a wonderful conceit and Miles handles it perfectly.
Most online reviews fail to mention the inner story in the novel. Bennie brings forth quotes from a Polish novel he's translating to illustrate the fates that befall us as we become responsible for our choices -- and for those fates for which we have no responsibility other than being in the right or wrong place at some time. This novel is brought into the letter several times. Each time with the point that an obscure life (even if it is a novel) sometimes illustrates and illuminates the fates that condemn us to either happiness or otherwise.
Dear American Airlines is one of the few books in the last five years that I've pushed on a friend. I almost never do that and it's a tribute to how bittersweet and wonderful this short novel is. Highly recommended.
[ 192 pages; ISBN 978-0547054018; read it in hardcover ]
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