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March 15th, 2009I knew Chip Kidd was a famous designer because I had seen his name on book jackets that he designed, and book jackets about the book jackets he had designed. His work is so ubiquitous that I figured he must be ancient, slightly junior to the pantheon of Rand, Glaser, Bass, and Chermayeff.
But actually, he’s only 44. And given how prolific he is you’d expect him to look weathered, but he doesn’t. This multi-tasker is a published Batman expert and rabid comics fan, and he’s also in a band. By day, he’s an art director for Knopf. And now he has produced his second novel. So all the elements are there: superhuman abilities, bifurcated life… There should be a superhero comic about him!
The Learners follows up Chip Kidd’s art school satire, The Cheese Monkeys. It follows our hero, Happy, out of college in 1961, to New Haven, CT where he scores a job at a mom and pop ad shop known to him as the former employer of his most influential commercial art teacher.
Though Happy is talented, we later learn that he was hired for reasons outside of his control, if not birthright. He adjusts quickly and smoothly to the agency, earning the mentorship of two elders, Tip and Sketch, both of whom are overqualified. Sketch, for example, is a drafting wizard who should instead be doing pencils for funny pages or for comics. In fact, it’s fascinating to observe some similarities between an ad shop and a comics bullpen: non-photo blue pencils, Photostat machines, pen nibs sorted like golf clubs, and the absorbing rapture of drawing. So maybe comics artists and ad men are two sides of the same commemorative gold coin. (Would Stan Lee and Charles Saatchi want to trade places?) But ad men eventually have to meet with clients. Some are despicable, others time-tested and reliable, such as the jolly potato chip rep Dick Stankey, whose regrettable fate embodies the end of this golden age of handrafted advertising design. Both are outvoted by the revolutionary demand for photographs, leading us to the wasteland of the gentrified Getty ghetto.
Happy is a workaholic whose life outside the studio is limited. (Sounds familiar.) We get a whirlwind sample of his long-lost partner in crime, the emotionally volatile Himillsy Dodd. She, though pixielike, is a renegade firebrand, a fallen angel, a drunken Bacchae who dazzles Happy, the studious Apollo. “For Himillsy, living dangerously was the only way to live. And me, I’m practically a crossing guard…I was her unwanted conscience.” Or she is his unfathomable Id. Our pent-up hero sublimates his sexual frustration into the elegant strokes of typography; it’s no wonder that he’s captivated by her untethered spirit.
The first half of The Learners is light and witty, full of snappy, bawdy humor covering everything from bitches to bestiality. Yet, the humor gives way to heartbreak, guilt, and failure, pushing the story toward more pithy terrain and toward the bildungsroman tradition. An all-too-close untimely death turns Happy upside-down. And then a cryptic “message in a bottle” prompts him to participate in a Yale experiment for which he had previously designed the cattle-call ad. This turns about to be the legendary Milgram experiment, Obedience to Authority, now covered in nearly every Intro to Psych course, which revealed ugly truths about those who participated. The harrowing section describing Happy’s trial in that lab is masterfully researched, a detailed, dramatic reenactment of the theater that occurred between science and subject. On the persuasive omniscience of the experimenter:
“How could he be so sure? So sure of everything? But he was, and I realized, yes, I was grateful for that – in the way I always was for people who were obviously smarter than I am. I no longer cared that he was a cold fish. His otherwise calm, beatific demeanor was the only thing that made this bearable. He could have told me that the air was black and I’d take his word for it, thank him for it.”
The Learners compares the manipulation of advertising to the banality of evil, whereby an ordinary person can be persuaded by authority to betray their better sense or conscience. “Is this about the Nazis and the Jews?” asks Happy, now catching on. “I was just following orders,” pleads another bewildered participant. True, propaganda and advertising have the same motive; advertising is just propaganda dressed up as your neighbor. But doesn’t it seem insensitive to compare direct mail ads to the Holocaust? Wouldn’t that mean that a Superbowl ad could convince us to commit crimes against humanity? I don’t know, but I was in California last November, and I saw the “Yes on 8″ TV spots, using children’s faces like human shields to convince a narrow majority to deny two consenting adults the right to marry each other. Those weren’t coercive orders, but they were persuasive, manipulative suggestions. So a poster ad for the next disposable reality show on the Bravo Network may not reveal my inner Eichmann, but maybe it’s just a question of degree.