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. (From Publishers Weekly)

Read The Learners: A Novel by Chip Kidd Online

Read all seven chapters of our story, PDF edition. Provided by USA Today.

Review:

"The Learners is dark as India Ink and its fine lines are sure and sharp and funny. As in life, people behave badly, and truly, and are only occasionally redeemed but often sorry. Kidd has created an unexpected narrative voice that moves and provokes and a novel that is, startlingly and even sweetly, not like anything else."

-- Amy Bloom, author of Away

"This story isn't simply told. It's painted. And the true treasure of The Learners is the ultra-stylized, deco-vision view that comes from staring at the world through Chip Kidd's forever-impressionable eyes. Blurbs always lie; this one's true. When you're done, you will see the world differently."

-- Brad Meltzer, author of The Book of Fate

"This gleefully roguish satire of 1960's advertising-gone-mad is delightfully shrewd, droll and urbane. And any novel that includes the phrase, 'bloated dirtpig' and features the beloved Milgram Experiments earns a place on my shelf. A must-read for the ambitious, creative, or chemically unbalanced."

-- Augusten Burroughs

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