From Airport Hell: A High Flying Novel

No one ever had more carry-on baggage than Bennie Ford, the narrator of Jonathan Miles’ sparkling debut novel, Dear American Airlines.

Enough, it turns out, to fill a book. Immured in Chicago’s O’Hare airport en route to his long-estranged daughter’s wedding, Bennie vents page after page, creating an epistolary novel with a narrator who takes after the Biblical sufferer Job. Miles, 37, a student and friend of the late Larry Brown, perfectly captured the excruciating physical space of the book’s setting through firsthand research—“At least 36 hours” at O’Hare, he says, “though it seemed much longer.”

A minor poet turned translator, Bennie has a nimble way of balancing haute culture and pop, and he serves as an excellent guide for the interminable layover. The stranded passengers become figures in Dante’s Purgatorio, and Stephen Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” serves as the 45-rpm embodiment of Tolstoy’s “Three Parables.” One tragicomic episode finds Bennie unwittingly imitating A Streetcar Named Desire. In another, he likens The Family Circus to a keyhole through which, as a child, he hoped to view “the quiescent hijinks of a ‘normal’ family.”

Polish literature, Dr. Fate comic books, the Bible—Miles attributes his book’s reach to “spotty research and failed Catholicism.” Throughout the novel, Miles explores Kafka’s dictum that the artist must place art before everything, with Bennie’s case as cautionary tale. Cautionary, but not bleak: The novel Bennie is translating begins to color his letter to the airline, and in a surprising way leads him out of the wreckage of his life. He emerges not unharmed, but more forgiving of human error, including his own—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.