Well, let’s just dump out the entire wheelbarrow of book-reviewing cliches: “Wildly inventive.” “Rich with detail.” Verbally dazzling.” “Wise and insightful.” “Poignant and moving.” “You’ll laugh your guts out.”

These are the numb yet cogent terms that continually revolved in my mind — like airliners stacked in a holding pattern around a control tower — as I read “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin, $22), the first novel by Jonathan Miles, cocktail columnist for The New York Times and book columnist for Men’s Journal, appropriate avocations for the author of a novel drenched in alcohol and bookishness. “Dear American Airlines” is, actually, rich and wild and dazzling and insightful and fall-on-the-floor funny and sad and tender, a first-person confession, mea culpa, erstwhile suicide note and epic letter of complaint to the airline in question for trapping its writer, Benjamin R. Ford, on the way to the wedding of the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Once he starts writing, fueled by anger, frustration, loneliness and cigarettes, be can’t stop.

Bennie Ford is a failed poet — “back when I was scramming delicious fellowships,” he says, “for the third-rate poems I was writing” — a failed lover and father, a failed person. “God, Bennie, that’s so like you,” says Stella, the long -absent mother of the long-neglected daughter. “Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal.” Bennie views these impossibilities and ideals, likely gleaned from his suicidal, “artistic” southern belle mother, with a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, hates himself for not living up to any standard of responsibility and decency, his own or anyone else’s. He makes a resplendent addition to the legion of smart, sensitive, observant, egotistical, rueful, raging, self-destructive and well-intentioned drunkards — i.e., American men — with which American fiction is rife.

As the hours at the airport wear wearily on, Bennie plunges deeper into the chastening acid-bath of his sins, putting into his letter a catalog of gross (and often hilarious) misjudgments, misbehaviors and missteps; he may have been a drunk, but he was a drunk on a grand, operatic scale, and some of his antics make “The Lost Weekend” look like “The Good Ship Lollipop.” The device of the letter of complaint is preposterous, of course, but among Miles’ many virtues as a fiction writer is making readers believe in it the letter and believe in Bennie’s rampaging and doleful personality and the necessity for this great unleashing. Since giving up poetry, with a sense of relief, Bennie has made a living of sorts as a translator of modern Polish literature; he includes in his massive missive passages from his latest translation, a novel called “The Free State of Trieste” by Alojzy Wojtkiewicz. Its hero is Walenty Mozelewski, a hapless Polish soldier who loses a leg at the battle of Monte Cassino, boards the wrong train after his convalescence, and finds himself in Trieste. These digressions — “you’ll have to permit me my digressions,” Bennie says — not only do not detract from the enterprise but they develop, with lovely subtlety, a parallel between the aspects of alienation and longing that permeate the spirits of these two lost men, the fictional character and the fictional-fictional character.

“Self-mythologizing,” Bennie writes, “like drinking for fourteen hours a day, will eventually grind you into residue.” There’s the point. Fed a truckload of mythologizing by his mother, ruined by the grandiosity of book-reading (no one should encounter Holderlin at 16, as I did), Bennie perceives everything through the lenses of his crippling self-regard. We root for him because his recklessness is partially leavened by the agents of his self-deprecating wit, his mordant eye for absurdity (others’ and his own) and his verbal virtuosity. Miles smartly withholds solace and keeps us guessing: Will Bennie make it to his daughter’s wedding? Will humility finally strike him, like Saul on the road to Tarsus (though rerouted through Damascus with a layover)? Will he run out of ink and paper?

You’ll have to read “Dear American Airlines” to find out. It’s as exhilarating as flying First Class on frequent flyer points.

Jonathan Miles will be at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss, Wednesday from 5 to 6 p.m. to read from and sign “Dear American Airlines.” Call (662) 236-2262.