‘Dear American Airlines’- What’s so novel about an air-travel complaint?

“Dear American Airlines” is the title.

And if you’re an alert reader of our Book Review pages, you already know that this new book (Houghton Mifflin, $22) is actually a novel — 180 pages of fiction, in the form of an epic complaint letter from a traveler stuck at O’Hare in Chicago.

But you may have further questions, especially if you’re more alert to the world of travel than the world of literature.

First, yes, you should have thought of this. If you’re flying much lately, you’ve surely had enough time to kill. You’ve probably started more than one complaint letter in your head, using many of the same four-letter words employed here by first-time novelist Jonathan Miles. But give Miles credit: He took his thought to a keyboard and he put in the hours.

Second, about the logistics. Yes, given their respective hub systems, I imagine that United annoys more customers in Chicago and American annoys more in Dallas-Fort Worth.

But I’m willing to cut the author slack on that. Also, in the novel, the narrator is stuck because of a canceled flight. This cancellation, which will force him to miss his daughter’s wedding, interrupted a $392.68 LaGuardia-ORD-LAX itinerary that depended upon a 45-minute layover in Chicago.

That’s not a bad price, but let me ask all you seasoned travelers with marriageable daughters: Would you have cut it so close on such an important trip? Yes? For shame.

Third: Yes, there’s a lot more to the book than that. Regret, profanity, sex. The word “groovy,” the city of Trieste, Italy. And it’s full of such felicitous, intriguing phrases as: “enclosed please find my sciatic nerve.”

Fourth: Yes, it may seem like an original idea. But once you look a little closer, you realize that literary history is pretty much one disgruntled traveler after another.

In “The Canterbury Tales,” 29 bed-and-breakfast guests, all on their way to Canterbury, indulge in a marathon of oversharing that any sensible innkeeper would have nipped in the bud.

In “Don Quixote,” a do-it-yourself dude ranch expedition gets messy.

In “Huckleberry Finn,” a Mississippi River cruise goes off course.

“Moby-Dick,” bad fishing trip.

“The Old Man and the Sea,” see above.

“Catch-22,” frequent flier finds his rewards program lacking.

So it goes.

Also: I don’t want to spoil the ending of “Dear American Airlines” for anybody, but the airline people should know that if current adverse conditions continue, many of their customers will respond with greater scorn and firmer resolve than this imaginary narrator. Maybe they’ll even draw from literary precedent.

Given the way the airlines have been treating us, what if we all started treating them the way the wives in “Lysistrata” decided to treat their husbands?

– Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 2:02 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Business Travel, Frequent Flier, Los Angeles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.