103 pages • 3 hours read
Rodman PhilbrickThe Last Book In The Universe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “All News Is Bad News”
Spaz runs until he’s spent and finds himself far from home. It’s late at night and unsafe to be in an unfamiliar part of the Urb. He sees enforcers, or “block guardians” (38), armed with blades and guns and worries whether they’ll know he’s “almost down with the Bangers” (37). He makes it home by creeping through the shadows to reach the Crypts. Someone is in his cube, a runner bent on keeping his identity secret; he’s only there to deliver a message that Bean is dying and wants to see him before she goes. After the messenger is gone, Spaz considers the situation and how there are three warring latches between himself (in Billy Bizmo’s latch) and his old family unit, in the latch from which he was banished.
In the morning, Spaz feels a sense of hope that Billy might help him gain safe passage and goes to see him, forgetting another of his rules, which is that Billy must come to see you, not the other way around. When he arrives at the Bangers’ headquarters on the bottom level of the Crypts, Spaz is unwelcome and is beaten up by Billy’s henchmen before being brought to him. Billy is busy under a probe, but Spaz interrupts him to ask permission to travel to see his sister; disturbed and annoyed, Billy will not give his permission and can’t be persuaded otherwise. He forces Spaz to repeat his rules. In his mind, Spaz is already planning his route to make the trip without the consent of the latchboss.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Smell of Lightning”
Spaz narrates the story of when Bean was 8 and had "the bone marrow sickness" (47), where she was bedridden and in pain and had to drink a bad medicine prescribed by an elderly woman known as a healer. Bean would only swallow it for Spaz, so he remained by her bedside for the entirety of her sickness, sleeping on the floor. When she got better, he had a seizure and Charly got upset with him.
At night, Spaz packs his bag and heads for the Edge because trying to directly cross three latches would be too dangerous. Crossing through the stacks, Little Face finds him; when he tries to return the child, a mob of ‘boxers surrounds him, calling out “Cut his red!” (49). Spaz has a grand mal seizure, which is signaled by the smell of lightning, and wakes up in Ryter’s stackbox just before dawn. Spaz explains to Ryter why he is in such a hurry to leave, and Ryter insists on coming with him, as a protector and a guide—one last adventure where he’ll learn Spaz’s story and help “save the life of a beloved young woman” (52). Ryter excitedly compares himself to Don Quixote, but not understanding the reference or knowing the literary figure, Spaz calls him “Don Keehote” (52).
Chapter 9 Summary: “By the Edge We Travel, By the Edge We Live or Die”
Little Face tries to follow the pair, but Ryter turns him back toward the stacks. Ryter brings up Charles Dickens, adding that he was epileptic as well. Spaz asks him not to talk about his condition any more, and Ryter agrees, but not before listing a lot of famous “backtimers” who had the condition. Ryter takes the lead, telling Spaz the Pipe not only leads out of the city into the Badlands where “the radiation will rot your bones” (58) but between all the latches, in an elaborate water supply system that was, according to him, the greatest of its time. Since then, refugees, including Ryter, used it to move around the city. Ryter wonders about Billy’s interest in Spaz; he encourages Spaz to try to figure it out because he thinks the latchboss might know something they don’t.
The duo has to walk for around seven miles, which Ryter finds especially difficult. They have to stop for the night at a part where the Pipe has broken open and they’ll need to travel above ground for approximately a mile. Partly due to the rats in the Pipe, they plan to sleep in shifts; Spaz wakes up with Ryter warning him that “they’re coming” (59). Spaz hears a sound approaching down the Pipe toward them.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
As in the previous section, Billy Bizmo continues to act more like a father figure to Spaz than a gang leader or boss, although Spaz does not seem capable of seeing or acknowledging this. Billy enforces a strict rule structure on Spaz that does not seem to apply to anyone but himself; he also is punished for interrupting or disrespecting Billy and is kept from doing something he wants to do or feels passionately about (i.e. visiting Bean) because it is too dangerous for him or even just because Billy says so.
In Chapter 8, the reader witnesses Spaz’s first epileptic seizure, which comes while the people of the stackboxes are surrounding him, threatening to beat and kill him. While this signature event of Spaz’s young life is described elsewhere in the text as well, a clear picture of what it is like to know a seizure is coming is depicted: “First the smell of lightning fills my nose, the clean electric smell of the air after a thunderstorm, and then the blackness rises up and takes me down” (49). The lightning is a motif for the seizure, as it recurs in the narrative and is used to signal a clear and purposeful event.
This section also continues to address the condition of epilepsy across history into the present, and how epileptic people are often mistreated as members of society. Picking up from an earlier reference to Alexander the Great, Ryter uses Chapter 9 to list a number of historical figures who were also epileptic: Charles Dickens, Julius Caesar, Napoléon Bonaparte, Leonardo da Vinci, Agatha Christie, Lewis Carroll, Harriet Tubman, Joan of Arc, Vincent van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Paganini.
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By Rodman Philbrick
