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Ok. I have about a zero tolerance level for deadbeat parents whose actions tend to wreak endless emotional havoc on the lives of their poor children. And yet somehow I find myself in Bennie’s corner. I want him to get on that plane. I want him to get to Speck’s wedding and walk her down the aisle. I want them to reconnect. Whether my hard heart has been softened by Bennie or by Jonathan Miles’s way with words, I can’t say, but I’ve gone soft.

When we last left Bennie, he’d just come out of that bar fight. Now we see that he’s helpless to explain his actions: “…I couldn’t honestly explain what had happened—why I’d poured that cement mixer—because to do that would expose the constriction and sense of dreams irredeemably deferred.” In these candid moments, we see his honesty and vulnerability. There’s no finger-pointing and no blame, just a sad admission. Even sadder? Just before Stella Sr. rips into him (and I think rightfully so), he’s thinking that everything is fine: “…the evening looked and felt like peace—not domestic détente, but the real thing.” Stella’s apocalyptic reprimand rips Bennie to the core as she touches on his many shortcomings, including his drinking: “ ‘When life isn’t aligning with the idea, you start drinking. Why? Because drinking pushes the life and the ideas of it closer together, makes them both so foggy that you can’t tell them apart.’ ” When Miles cuts back to Walenty, we find that he too has been wounded—Bennie crippled by life, Walenty by war. At this point I welcomed the comic relief of a now sober Bennie sitting in the airport bar referring to the bottles of alcohol as his “old ex-pals,” and his observations on Bob’s purple wiener.

When Miles moves back to Bennie’s home life, I find Bennie’s comments about his mother and Aneta very touching. I hear a tender quality in his voice when he talks about them, and I found his mother’s Post-it assessment of Aneta’s crush on the mini-rocker Minideth—“Love is Love”—quite moving.

I feel as though there is a lot of acceptance and forgiveness in this book. What do you think? I was especially impressed by Stella Jr.’s exchanges with Bennie. I like how he describes their amicable conversation as “a squirt of oil in the decayed rusted joints of our bond.” She seems to be a person with a very big heart, so much so that Bennie is comfortable asking her, despite everything, if he can walk her down the aisle. When she finally agrees, there is such a sense of hope in the book, and in Bennie. Then you remember that, of course, he’s still stuck at the airport and at the mercy of American Airlines.

The raw description of the evening after Bennie and Stella’s final argument is painful. Bennie, despite his drunken stupor, is totally in touch with his feelings and seems to fully accept the blame for all the pain that he has caused: “…I was trapped within myself and my life, there was no ending or outcome that wasn’t going to hurt me or them or us all. Yet at the same time I didn’t or couldn’t believe that at all. There were words that could fix this, there had to be.” The whole scene seems hopeless, but we are once again saved by humor. I laughed out loud when Bennie, locked out of his apartment, bellows out for Stella: “You cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment. . .” And isn’t real life like that? (Thank God.) I’ve noticed moments of humor in the worst of times, haven’t you?

I found it interesting that Bennie takes so long to really talk about his father. Though he describes their relationship as mostly flat, and happy memories few, he fondly recalls the moments of his father reading Polish poetry to him: “…in those dark, poem-strewn moments, he was nothing short of magical—a wizard conjuring forth my dreams with his clandestine and incantatory language.” It makes me wonder why Bennie doesn’t feel very much when his father dies. I thought that was rather odd. Especially when we find out that Bennie goes to live in Poland for a period on a poets’ exchange program. Clearly it seems that he’s gotten his love of words and poetry from his father, so I was surprised by the lack of emotion.

We also find out that Bennie did enjoy some early success with his poetry. It’s sad that he quickly lost his momentum. And, of course, we are treated to Bennie’s description of his relationship with “Poor Margaret,” his first wife. I liked how they met at a party, while Bennie is hiding meatball canapés in his host’s furniture.

We certainly know Benjamin R. Ford a lot better. For those of you who were ambivalent about him earlier on, how do you feel now? I’ll be back next week, once when we’ve read up to page 141.

—Suzanne Rust

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