Reluctant Flier Jonathan Miles Takes a Pen to (Un)Friendly Skies

May 30, 2008 -- NEW YORK — When Jonathan Miles read that the airline industry is predicting another summer of delays, his first thought was: "That's good for the book."

Miles' debut novel, Dear American Airlines (Houghton Mifflin, $22), is written in the form of an exasperated 180-page letter of complaint from a passenger stranded at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Miles' second thought had to do with his book tour — 15 cities in 24 days, cross-country, mostly by plane — beginning Monday in Jackson, Miss.

As he put it on a recent visit to JFK International Airport, "What's good for the book may not be so good for me. I'm very torn."

The novel was inspired by the author's own overnight stay on the floor at O'Hare.

Eight years ago, Miles, 37, a freelance magazine writer, was flying on American Airlines from Memphis to New York via Chicago. Or was trying to.

After circling O'Hare, the plane landed in Peoria, Ill., and the passengers were bused to O'Hare, which is exactly what happens in his novel.

Miles says the airline blamed a "weather situation," as it does in the novel, even after eight hours in Chicago, where it was "flat-out delightful."

He recalls trying to sleep on the floor and starting a letter in his head, "Dear American Airlines … "

It was fueled by "that outsized resentment you feel when you sense you're in the pinchers of some large corporation," he says. "It's like being put on hold for 45 minutes when you're trying to order a part to fix your coffee machine."

He never finished the letter. He decided, "I really didn't have that much in my life to complain about."

But he began to imagine a character who did: Benjamin Ford, an alcoholic, washed-up poet who's trying to rehab his life by attending the wedding of a daughter he hasn't seen in years.

In his letter, Ford pours out his troubles. He mentions a "marriage so brief that I think I used the same bath towel for its entire duration." And he complains about O'Hare's seats: "Dear American Airlines, enclosed please find my sciatic nerve."