Books: The Learners By Chip Kidd (2008)

“Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be -- well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty -- chiefly, his own.”

The Learners is the follow up to The Cheese Monkeys, world-renowned Graphic Artist Chip Kidd and continues to his semi-autobiographical adventures. And much like his first novel, the follow-up also sheds more light on “great invisible arts of our culture.” Here he combines his artistic eye and how it’s used in advertising along with a second storyline, that of real-life psychologist Stanley Milgram and his 1960s experiment on human response to authority. My assumption is that Milgram’s psychological work and the psychology of advertising are suppose to parallel (or be a metaphor) each other, but the two-plot lines fail to fully converge in anything meaningful, which feels like a real missed opportunity.

While I felt the book moved swiftly for me, more so because of Kidd’s voice, his snappy dialogue and his witty little characters, but the story really goes nowhere –it’s like slice of life entries more than anything. Yes, there is lots of clever stuff in this book, including a great discussion on form vs. content, but story is too jumbled, too choppy for its own good.

Still, as always, I would recommend it for its sharp and witty prose. But I still feel you need to be a fan of modern humorist writers like David Sedaris, Joe Keenan, and, Christopher Moore to appreciate the sly, absurdist jesting.