This is a sequel to the author's first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, where graphic designer Happy (a nickname), finds a job and then gets involved in Stanley Milgrim's notorious Obedience to Authority experiment. The story is set in 1961 and is mostly about Happy's reaction to participating in the expirement and about graphic design. The author is a well-known graphic designer himself, especially of books. It's a thin story though and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as The Cheese Monkeys. It has its moments but it's not a book I'd recommend. There isn't much in the way of characterization and the secondary characters are flat. Mostly, this is an excuse to yammer on about graphic design in a cute way. Skip it. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Any graphic designer worth their salt will already know who Chip Kidd is; he's the one who single-handedly transformed the subject of book design as we know it, the very first designer to regularly demand that his name appear on a book's dust jacket or copyright page. And in fact, back in 2001 Kidd caught the writing bug himself, and ended up putting out a small yet well-regarded novel entitled The Cheese Monkeys, set in the Modernist '60s and dealing with the noble frustrations of graphic design, specifically in a college setting during the years when the subject of design was first starting to be taken seriously by the academic community. I read and enjoyed The Cheese Monkeys myself, in fact, years before opening CCLaP which is why I've never done a write-up of it; so needless to say, I was happy to see that Kidd had actually written a sequel this year, entitled The Learners and putting our previous student hero now in New York and working his first corporate job.

So ask me how shocked and disappointed I was, then, to actually read The Learners last month and discover that something with Kidd and his writing has gone horribly, horribly wrong in the seven years since Cheese Monkeys; this novel is flat where the original was bubbly, fussy and pretentious where the original was charming and illuminating. And for the life of me, I can't figure out what the problem is either; maybe it's that the setting has moved from a college environment to a corporate one? Because, see, I have this clear recollection of Cheese Monkeys' obsessive fastidiousness about All Things Design to be a delightful treat, a warm love letter from Kidd to this industry he so obviously adores, full of the exact kinds of incisive yet obscure topics of the world that only designers seem to think about on a regular basis; but in The Learners, this fastidiousness just comes off as dysfunctionally nerdy, elitist horsesh-t, the exact kind of stuff you might hear some shaved-head black-glasses NPR Weenie spouting about in the corner of a cocktail party, that makes you just want to walk over and punch him as hard as you possibly can in the middle of his smug little Helvetica-worshipping face. (And yes, I mean both the typeface and the 2007 Gary Hustwit documentary, you f-cking nerd, and man, you really are looking for a punch in the face today, aren't you?) It was a real disappointment, even more of a frustrating experience by not being able to tell where exactly it all starts going wrong; unless you're a graphic designer at a corporate agency yourself, I recommend skipping the book altogether.

Out of 10: 4.4 ( )

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The sequel to The Cheese Monkeys, and a whopping disappointment. Where to begin...well, Chip Kidd still has a good writing voice. And he starts out the novel with an interesting and realistic, if bizarrely named, cast of characters. But then he shuffles them all off to the side, or just outright kills them, for an ill-advised trip into the History of Psychology. I mean, why is a graphic artist-turned-author telling me about the Milgram experiment? Did he hear it mentioned on NPR, read the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_...), and suddenly decide to shoehorn it into his book about a New Haven advertising agency in the 1960s? What was he thinking? Kidd's whole analysis of the scientific ethics of the situation comes across as angsty whining, which leads me to my other big complaint about this book: Kidd cannot deal with Emotion (as opposed to "emotion") in his characters. It all sounds abrupt and melodramatic and annoying. I didn't notice this in The Cheese Monkeys, except right at the last page, but I just took that to be some sort of magical realist kind of conceit to round out the novel. Hmm. I'll give The Learners two-and-a-half stars for what the novel started out as, but I'm taking away two-and-a-half for the sophomoric, pseudo-psychological drivel it turned into. You should stick to what you know, Mr. Kidd, and apparently you only know about graphic design (oh man, that was harsh; I'm sorry, but really, leave the big questions of psychology alone from now on; P.S., I loved The Cheese Monkeys). ( )

ending really upset me at the moment I read it, but then appreciated it--very twisted, but also comical ( )