The Learners: The Book After "The Cheese Monkeys" (P.S.) (Taschenbuch)

A sequel to book designer Kidd's first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, this beautifully composed paean to pre-computer graphic design pitches recent graduate Happy (his nickname), now 21, into the mercantile halls of down-at-the-heels New Haven ad agency Spears, Rakoff and Ware. Kidd paints the agency with all the customary conventions of a mid-century office culture farce: lacquered secretaries, lunchtime scotches and broken-down businessmen. Happy wiles away his time in blissful drudgery until he fields a call for designing a tiny ad for a seemingly innocuous psychological study. The study is being run by (real-life psychologist) Stanley Milgram, and Happy is unable to resist volunteering; little surprise for readers that Happy finds himself a participant in Milgram's notorious Obedience to Authority experiment, playing the role of The Teacher who is ordered to shock The Learner with near-lethal doses of electricity. Though character development is less the point than jokes about behaviorism and old school office culture's last gasps, the experiment teaches Happy more than he ever hoped to know. The jokes are sometimes dippy, and some of the typographical pyrotechnics are on the twee side. But Kidd's ebullience and generosity in unpacking the art and practice of graphic design carry the novel. (Feb.)
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"Like "The Cheese Monkeys," "The Learners" is about learning--again under duress--to see everything, including oneself, differently....[In] Kidd's attempt to blend the satirical and serious...he modulates the mix just right in the novel's redemptive climax, which is both wild and winning, funny and moving." (San Francisco Chronicle )

"Arresting and hip....captivating." (Christian Science Monitor )

"Amusing and thought-provoking." (New York Newsday )

"Required reading." (New York Post )

"Ingenious....The Learners seduces the reader through a deceptive manipulation of form and content: It's a matryoshka, or stacking doll, that hides a startling, dark content. By the time we get to the end of the first of its three parts, we are dropped into a creepy, disturbing, sociopolitical satire." (Philadelphia Inquirer )

"The book as an object is beautiful, a testament to its subject matter...charming, heart-wrenching and funny....An enjoyable read." (Lincoln Star Journal (Nebraska) )

"Funny, insightful and even educational...quite witty." (The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo) )

"Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways....His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings--[an] immensely enjoyable novel." (Boston Globe )

"A fascinating study of the shape and texture of words....Kidd's transition from artist to author is natural and seamless....[The Learners is] humorous and insightful and full of amusingly accurate scenes from the early 1960s--right down to the three-martini lunches and pillbox hats." (The Sunday Oregonian )

"Chip Kidd, in his second novel, The Learners, repeats and evolves the typographical high jinks he gave us in The Cheese Monkeys....Kidd's quirky approach to life is endearingly recognizable in its expression." (Los Angeles Times )

"Kidd captures the predigital art department just right....[He] seamlessly weaves real-world detail into his fiction--brushed-aluminum office furniture, Jackie O. ensembles--while offering primers in typography and design tools." (Newsweek )

"[The Learners] offers an enjoyable introduction to another world and a major writing talent....genuinely interesting...sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way....[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch." (USA Today )

"[Chip Kidd's] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs, which include this one." (Newport News Daily Press )

"The novel stays firmly comic: quick and droll and sly. And, like Kidd's previous novel, the most sparkling pages are when Happy and his colleagues discuss how to draw a straight line, or the ironically invisible power of typography." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )

''The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery...the book is packed with sharp insights....Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer." (New York Times Book Review )

"Kidd smoothly mixes the reality of Milgram's rather sinister work with the fiction of Happy's new life in advertising....Even more impressive than the blend of fiction and fact is the way that "The Learners" shifts from raucous ad office comedy to the tragic repercussions of the Yale experiments." (Connecticut Post Online )

"The advertising business and the [Milgram psychology] experiment are linked in this swift, often funny and always intelligent book." (Hartford Courant )

"Kidd uses his narrative to investigate the relationships between form and content, authority and advertising....pointed observations on design and mass culture make this short novel a compelling read." (Chicago Reader )

"Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion....Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined." (Calgary Herald (Alberta) )

"Snappy....Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles...A-" (Entertainment Weekly )

"Iconic graphic designer Kidd coins a new genre-stylized sentimentalism (think AMC's Mad Men without the bile)-to tell this tale of a creative naif's aesthetic and emotional coming of age. . . . Grade: A" (Washington Post )

"[Chip Kidd's] fiction is just as smart and lively as the covers, typography and layout of the books he designs...swift, often funny and always intelligent." (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel )

"Kidd's novel is slyly funny as well as starkly emotional, and never overwritten or melodramatic. He has a Dickensian flair for giving his characters names that somehow suit them, and yet gives them a depth and poignancy that resonates long after the last page." (Wichita Eagle )

"Always intriguing, this is a strange mixture of the frivolous and the disturbing." (Financial Times (London) )