Goodreads | The Learners (P.S.) by Chip Kidd

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5		17%
4		34%
3		31%
2		11%
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100+ Book Challenge: koralute's books of 2008	5	304	3 days ago, 10:55PM

Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 0743255240)

03/08/08

Read in March, 2008

Awful.

The Learners features the same eternally naive, lovable (?), ball-less and ostensible like thirteen-year-old protagonist as The Cheese Monkeys (it's even subtitled "The Book After The Cheese Monkeys"), Happy (read: Hapless), now out of art school and working for an ad agency. Only this time, not content with simply focusing on something he's familiar with (graphic design), Kidd throws in a second storyline, that of real-life psychologist Stanley Milgram and h...more Awful.

The Learners features the same eternally naive, lovable (?), ball-less and ostensible like thirteen-year-old protagonist as The Cheese Monkeys (it's even subtitled "The Book After The Cheese Monkeys"), Happy (read: Hapless), now out of art school and working for an ad agency. Only this time, not content with simply focusing on something he's familiar with (graphic design), Kidd throws in a second storyline, that of real-life psychologist Stanley Milgram and his 1960s experiment on human response to authority. The novel's title comes from this subplot, which is so incidental and poorly developed I had to go back and read it again, like I'd missed it. Apparently though it's like this life-altering experience for Happy (he describes Milgram as one of "his two great teachers," a man who "taught him who [he:] really [is:].") Really? Happy has nightmares and visions, and flips out on a business big-wig in an important meeting, all because of this experience, even though it's entirely forgettable as described in the novel.

Stylistically, I guess I may simply be outside of the audience Kidd's writing for. Perhaps fans of comic books and genre fiction are who he's after, but phrases like "yowza" don't really float my boat, and when Happy spends a few pages describing (very much telling, versus showing) himself to the reader, then says, "OK. What else?" and continues, it not only doesn't float my boat, it sort of drops a large bomb on it and sinks it real fast. Different typefaces are used here and there, of course, though while it doesn't really add much, it's not that distracting or gratuitous.

Also though, there're these little page-long italic interjections where Irony, Content, Form, Wit, etc. make little appearances and speak to the reader, first defining themselves (do we really need a midnovel definition of irony?), and then maybe providing little anecdotes that don't really apply to the story.

The book is really nicely laid out, but you know Kidd wrote the thing in InDesign, meaning if there was a widow or some bad line-break or something, you can't help but assume he cut a word or two to make it all fit nicely (the aforementioned italic interjections are all exactly one page long, e.g.). Which is disappointing. Kidd is most definitely a designer first and a writer second, and this book makes it clear that that second is and should remain a very, very distant one. This is no Only Revolutions, Kidd has worlds more restraint and acumen than Danielewski, but still. The Learners is basically Michael Jordan deciding he wants to give baseball a try....less

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Randomanthony rated it:

(review of isbn 0743255240)

11/22/08

Apparently this Chip Kidd guy is some famous graphic artist/book jacket designer. I picked up the book from the library's "new" shelf initially because of the cool jacket, then checked it out because Augusten Burroughs about pees himself giving a back cover blurb.

The Learners focuses on identity, self-knowledge, graphic design/advertising, and Milligram's (sp?) Yale experiments. Mr. Kidd's sharp, fluid writing carries like interesting bar conversation put to paper. I me...more

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oriana rated it:

(review of isbn 0743255240)

03/17/08

bookshelves: read-2008, why-werent-you-better

Sigh. I've been thinking for the last few days about what I should say in this review. I love Chip Kidd's voice, you see, his snappy dialogue and his witty little characters and his charming descriptions. There's a lot of clever stuff in this book, too, including smart digressions on form vs. content, design in general, psychology, and clothing from the fifties. But the story... well it didn't really go anywhere. Or, rather, the places that it managed to go were not at all satisfying. To ...more

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Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 0743255240)

09/02/08

Read in September, 2008

(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 Ki...more (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 ...less

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