There’s something that has always irked me about the work of world famous book designer (OK, maybe he’s the only famous book designer) Chip Kidd.

As technically excellent as his book jackets are, there’s an overly fussy element that — given his use of retro pastiche needlessly calling attention to itself — is like a hotel restaurant uptowning onion rings with architectural plating and a puddle of saffron-infused reduction. Case in point: the cover of Kidd’s second turn as a novelist, The Learners (Scribner, 288 pages, $29.99), with its distressed font butted against a script-font spine and elegant half-cover wraparound, might as well also come in a Bakelite sleeve. It’s taste that undoes itself with excess.

It’s a surprise, then, that Kidd’s writing is so sloppy, smart and endlessly enjoyable. The Learners tells the story of Happy, a graphic designer in 1961 who joins the Spear, Rakoff & Ware advertising agency of New Haven. As Happy gets indoctrinated into the world of advertising, Kidd shines with rich dialogue based in occupational argot, like Mamet’s best work. “Now, I’m trying to decide what kind of face the potato chip should have,” Happy’s co-worker grouses. “‘Well, it’s obvious to me,’ he answers, ‘It should look chipper.’” Or later on, when Happy is defending his ideas for ketchup and mustard dispensers made from plastic: “‘We shake things — bottles, now, because they’re glass. But at some point I think they won’t be. Glass breaks and doesn’t give. Plastic’s the opposite. I think things should be squeezed. I’d rather be squeezed than shaken. Wouldn’t you?’ Good lord what was wrong with me.”

Soon, Happy is assigned the task of designing an advertisement for a college study that turns out to be the Milgram Experiment, and Happy himself is drawn into being a participant with dark results. The Milgram Experiment, along with the novel’s era, is a great device as it allows Kidd loopy ruminations on his own profession and the aesthetics of manipulation. In the early ’60s, Helvetica had just been designed and advertising had outgrown its hard sell roots and was reaping rewards out of findings from then-burgeoning behavioral science departments. From one of those schools came the Milgram Experiment, a study that investigated how people could obey an authority figure and perform acts that conflicted with their own personal consciences. Kidd makes a few amateurish mistakes, such as a rambling narrator, and a tonal problem between his satirical and, as the book progresses, serious passages.

The Learners may be more a sensory experience of Kidd’s ideas, obsessions and vamps than it is a conventional novel, but the author’s energy more than holds the book’s atoms together. 

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