The Learners: A Novel

My official overall opinion of this book is that it was alright. I loved the first book, [The Cheese Monkeys] which is why I wanted to read this, but I think it fell very short of the first novel. I think I would have enjoyed it better as a stand alone book with a completely new cast of characters.

The Learners follows the main character “Happy” after he graduates from college with a degree in graphic design and gets a job at the ad agency where Winter (his GA professor from the first novel) had his first job as a graphic artist. We are then introduced to a new group of people who work for the agency all with their little quirks, including the head of the agency who is literally in love with her dog, and hired Happy on the notion that the structure of his ears made him destined to be a genius. Happy runs into Himillsy (his crazy BFF from The Cheese Monkeys) once then finds out a few weeks later that she killed herself. In an effort to explain to himself why she did it he remembers from their lunch conversation that she was doing “memory exercises”, and linked that to an ad he actually created for a research study on memories. Happy then volunteers for the research study himself which was actually Milgrim’s study on obedience, a real study conducted in the early 60’s to try to explain why so many of the Nazis followed Hitler’s lead during WWII. I remember the study from Psyc. class from a few years back and it was interesting to read about the thoughts of a person who participated in the study, fictional though they may be.

As a very brief overview; Milgrim’s Obedience study consisted of telling the participant to administer an electrical shock to the other supposed participant (who was actually part of the experiment) whenever they were unable to correctly identify the second word in an earlier stated set of word pairs. The shocks went up to 450 volts, enough to kill someone, and when a participant asked to stop or expressed concerns they were told “The experiment requires that you continue.” And that “The shocks were harmful but not fatal”. The man participants thought they were shocking was safely in another room and his cries of pain and agony were actually on a recording.

Happy, as well as 60% of actual participants did manage to administer the full 450 volt shock to a person they had never met before, all the while believing that they had killed that man. When the experiment is revealed and the participants were asked why they continued even though they believed they were killing an innocent person, many of them, as well as many Nazis gave the excuse that they were “Just following orders”. Fascinating! I actually found this to be the most interesting part of this book and would be interested in reading more about the experiment and its findings.

Happy is tortured by the idea that he had within him the potential to kill another innocent human being, and this thought consumes him. He is then reminded again of Himillsy and the way she intended to deal with this information, and tries to follow her example. In the end he finds a way to redeem himself in his own eyes and prove to himself that he is in fact, a good person.

Again, I think this may have been better as a stand alone novel. Happy’s choice to move to New Haven to work at the ad agency was almost irrelevant to the main story, and it could have been centered around anyone already living there who decided to volunteer for the experiment. Happy’s involvement with the ad agency seems almost like background fodder to me, and his somewhat troubled but mundane character didn’t have the balance of his out-of-control friend Himillsy, or the demanding-with-reason professor Winter that the first novel had. ( )

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 ( )

Sequel to The Cheese Monkeys. Same strengths, and weaknesses. Does have a take on an historic study that I'd never thought about before, and which sent chills down my spine. ( )

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