Dear Corporate Fuckers

Are you ready for novel as corporate complaint letter? Well, after reading Jonathan Miles' Dear American Airlines, I say bury the memoir at the bottom of the sea and bring in the era of angry, self-loathing confessional missives and let's take out the failures of our lives on the impersonal global corporations that make us feel as colorless as we suspect we might be in those dark 3:00 AM bouts with that bottle of red. Our humbled narrator, Bennie, is sitting in O'Hare, having been bussed in from Peoria, his flight terminated due to inclement weather no one can see, and he's going to miss his estranged daughter's wedding, at which his only child plans to marry another woman in California. Bennie decides he has to keep the one promise he made to her as a baby, which is to walk her down the aisle, and as he sits stewing in the plastic, disc-crunching chairs the airport bought cheap from the CIA program for enhanced interrogation techniques, he begins to marinate in the cocktail fogged memory of his life, and to wonder if there are fifth chances or if the big out is the only honorable option. This is a special kind of naval-gazing, for as we wind through the vodka-soaked disaster of Bennie's life, he jumps back to the sterile confines of an airport culture that contrasts with the scenes of his past, the wannabe poet/bartender fighting the dangerous romantic illusions that make the real people in our lives so disappointing. Bennie is a drunken loser who bought the dream of life that literature promised, but it's hard not to emphathize when the drones stare up at Chris Matthews or down at the inane jottings of another text message. The novel is both an attack on that sterility and a warning about art's promises. It's also very funny, and at a tidy 192 pages, you need not wade through dark forests to find nuggets. They are there on almost every page.