'Please continue with the experiment'

'Only following orders."

The phrase resonated in 1961 during the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jersusalem, a bureaucratic defense to a bureaucracy that brought a new standard of industrial efficiency to mass horror.

The phrase resonates again in Chip Kidd's novel "The Learners," set in 1961 in New Haven, Conn., where the words are uttered by a woman who is trying to explain why she continued to deliver what she believed were painful electric shocks to a man she didn't know, despite his screams begging her to stop.

The scenario is based on the actual experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram, who illustrated that the average American in the early 1960s was as capable of cruelty as the average German in the early 1940s.

In Kidd's novel, one of Milgram's recruits is a 21-year-old recent college graduate, Happy, who has landed in New Haven to work at a small advertising firm that once employed one of his mentors.

Advertising was still a young industry, characterized by snappy slogans and cute cartoon characters rather than emotions and identity politics. Only the youngest at the firm understand that the future lies in selling the need for products rather than the products themselves.

The birth of contemporary advertising and the rise of bureaucratic authority: One could do worse than these two as explainers of the 20th-century zeitgeist. Sounds like fertile ground for a great novel.

But it's a good smallish book; it has a (purposefully) naive charm to it, narrated through the eyes of a young man to whom the new adult world of martini lunches and pitch meetings is as bright and shiny as a new nickel.

And Kidd is a talented stylist. "The Learners" is only his second novel; he is better known as the publishing world's best-known designer of book jackets and packaging. He has become hugely successful at persuading people that not only can you judge a book by its cover, but that you should.

(Not incidentally, the striking cover to "The Learners" is designed by Kidd, with an illustration by the great indie comics artist Charles Burns.)

One can see and appreciate Kidd's great designer's eye for detail throughout "The Learners," in vivid descriptions of people, places and objects (and type fonts) that defined a postwar America bidding Eisenhower goodbye and Kennedy hello, a country enamored of the future and its place in it.

In Kidd's hand, a man on a train gapes at Happy, "his hoggy hole full and dilated with a horrid muck of wet bread and mangled cold cuts."

The receptionist there is a woman "with ice-white hair the shape and texture of spun sugar," a "pretty knife of a face" and "perfect hands and attending scarlet talons."

But Kidd's eye is a bit superficial, too. There's a large cast of supporting characters, all of whom are exactingly described but who, frustratingly, we don't get to know very well.

And there are several subplots, any one of which might have paid off had Kidd just drilled deeper into them. The sequence on the Milgram experiments has a lot of promise. The appearance and mysterious disappearance of an old friend -- the best character in the book -- are little more than a tease. An anecdote about homosexuality opens the door to a deeper understanding of Happy, but never crosses the threshold. A reference to the Eichmann trial is supposed to give the book some moral heft, and does, but it feels tacked on, obvious, inorganic. The story line builds to a climax that is so quickly resolved that it doesn't pay off emotionally.

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

Eric Hanson is a Star Tribune staff writer.

Publisher: Scribner, 260 pages, $26.

Review: Kidd demonstrates his exquisite eye for detail, but falls short of fully mining his fertile territory of advertising, corporate life and obedience and authority.