Some people take up art as a hobby, but what's your hobby when you're an artist? If you're Chip Kidd, famed book cover designer, the answer is WRITING. And unlike most hobbies, writing has the potential to be at least somewhat profitable, especially if you're already in with all the publishers. Chip's first book, The Cheese Monkeys, was a quick read, and you could tell (for better and for worse) that it was a fun little side project for him, a sort of halfway-edited NaNoWriMo novel, with some of the rough edges being cute and some being...well, rough.
For the sequel, though, it looks like Chip's getting better with practice. The story, set in the early sixties, follows Happy out of Penn State and into the workforce at a small ad agency in New Haven (AKA Yalesville). I'm still slightly miffed that Chip REFUSES to reveal Happy's real name (it's explicitly a nickname), but I'm (pretty) sure that annoyance was Chip's intention, so I'll chalk it up to artistic license. Those who read the first book will probably be disappointed that Chip didn't bring Happy's teacher, Winter Sorbeck, back into the narrative (maybe he's saving it for Number Three???), and that Himillsey Dodd, Happy's friend from school, kills herself off so quickly. But the message is clear: This is about Happy.
Chip's characters were MUCH more believable this time around, and more complex (and therefore exciting). Chip's little asides on graphic design were interesting, too (merging a little work with the hobby?). But my favorite part of the book was Chip's inclusion of the Stanley Milgram experiment, in all its historical detail. Happy, the fictional character, designs the ad that Milgram runs for the experiment at Yale, and eventually participates, discovering himself capable of unimagined cruelty. If you've never heard of it, crawl out from under your rock and look it up.
This was meant to be short and sweet--I don't want to give too much away. I will say that I will definitely be picking up Number Three, if it's ever out there. I will also say something about Chip that I mean, sincerely, as a very high compliment: He writes without pretense. That's the thing with hobbies. He's not trying to prove anything to anyone. His writing is short, quick, punctuated, uncluttered, to-the-point. You could probably grate some symbolism out of it if you wanted to, but I'm sure he only meant a little of it. In a world where "novels" are bloated and high-strung, stocked with long, "artsy" sentences that you're supposed to pretend to enjoy, Chip doesn't really care. He's a REAL artist, and gets well-paid and -respected for it. He doesn't need to use his writing to showcase his intelligence--it's right on the cover of the last book cover he designed. This was brought home on the cover of his last book, when, presenting the cover reviews, he had SOME PEOPLE LIKED IT followed by the good reviews and SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T followed by bad reviews.
Real men may wear pink shirts, but real artists don't care about bad reviews, and Chip is one of them. "You don't like my hobby?" he says. "Get your own. Better yet, get a job. Something USEFUL." Maybe, as an essay I read recently hoped, the American disdain for snobbery in literature will make a comeback, and maybe Chip will lead the way. This one, at least, will be a good review.
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