With his second novel THE LEARNERS, Chip Kidd moves into the revered pantheon of postmodernist writers who have an affinity for the quirky (authors like David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, etc.). But the charm comes from his unpretentious storytelling, and a welcome belief in brevity.

The tale revolves around a young man who obtains his first job as a graphic designer at a small advertising firm. This position allows Kidd, who is perhaps this country’s most influential book designer, to share thoughts on the meaning of typography, form and content. These aren’t just pedantic asides, they are integral to the story and frankly, I was hoping for more of them. One of these comes when the character explains exactly how and why he set the type for a very particular advertisement, an ad that will eventually change his life forever.

The ad is run by Professor Stanley Milgram, and it is recruiting individuals to participate in an experiment related to memory. Of course, this is actually the very famous Milgram experiment, where he duped participants into believing that they were administering electrical shocks to another participant in a different room. They were divided into “teachers” and “learners,” but the learner was actually an actor hired to perform a role. The learners had to remember a series of word pairs. For every one they got wrong, the teacher would administer an electrical shock that escalated in power with each successive wrong answer. At some point, the learner would start really complaining about the pain, even screaming in agony. But the “experimentor” who sat with the teacher would calmly keep telling the teacher to proceed, everything was fine, the experiment must go on. It was Milgram’s investigation into how seemingly ordinary people would blindly obey an authority figure they trusted, even going so far as to administer potentially lethal shocks.

It is this experiment in which Kidd’s character participates, and what really drives the second half of the story. Don’t worry though, this isn’t a book of smarmy psychobabble, it’s really a loving investigation into the main character’s own understanding of who he is and what he can become. The wildly eccentric characters that surround him at the ad agency add not only comic relief and color, but they each have their own personalities, and would benefit from a bit of the soul-searching that the main character is forced to do.

This is an excellent, charming, often funny book mixed with thought-provoking commentary. Recommended. —Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• CHIP KIDD: BOOK ONE – WORK: 1986-2006 by Chip Kidd