The Learners: The Book After "The Cheese Monkeys" (P.S.)

THE BOOK THAT NEWSWEEK CALLS "MAD MEN: THE NOVEL."

THE GOOD:

"The Learners, the ingenious sophomore effort by book designer-turned-novelist Chip Kidd, is a stunning exercise in contrasts, double meanings, and irony. Kidd's sudden shifts will disturb and disorient: Unless you're willing to follow him down the rabbit hole, you may feel betrayed. Then again, who said art was supposed to make us feel good?" Philadelphia Inquirer

"The implication that the selling of potato chips and the attempted annihilation of a people are rooted in the same principles of manipulation might have appeared facile or even offensive if handled less sensitively, but Kidd pulls it off. He's able to do it because he makes his point in the context of a classic coming-of-age narrative set in a specific time and place rendered concincingly surreal....Kidd has held up an engrossing distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined." Montreal Gazette

"Unlike many contemporary comic novelists, [Kidd]'s smart enough to tie his new-fangled gimmicks to some old-fashioned virtures: sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way." USA Today

"Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer....The book's charms are, literally and figuratively, in the details: the visual observations, the comedy of the office's small-stakes battles, and the meditations on Kidd's own graphic art." New York Times Book Review

"Kidd invents a banter-filler workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad-Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles (consider page 62's layout to a mini master class). A-" Entertainment Weekly

"The retro detailing is lovingly rendered, the humor sharp and catty. The book has a dark undertow, though....Always intriguing, this is a stange mixture of the frivolous and the disturbing." Financial Times (London)

THE BAD:

"For all its style, The Learners doesn't add up to much. It's like advertising in that respect: Tastes good, less filling." Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The jokes are sometimes dippy, and some of the typographical pyrotechnics are on the twee side." Publishers Weekly

The New York Times - James Poniewozik

The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery…the book's charms are, literally and figuratively, in the details: the visual observations, the comedy of the office's small-stakes battles and the meditations on Kidd's own graphic art, which at their best moments serve his protagonist's character as well. In one touching passage, Happy lays out examples on the page of all the ways one can typeset the words "Forgive me," but concludes that typography "has its limits like everything else." In another novel, it might seem like showy metafictional playing around. In The Learners, it's a sweet, small reminder of how words —and type—can fail us.