56 pages • 1 hour read
Gordon KormanWhatshisface
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Meets Whatshisface”
Content Warning: This source text depicts bullying and insensitive remarks about mental health.
Cooper Vega is a 12-year-old seventh grader. His dad, Captain Vega, is in the U.S. Army, so the Vega family moves often. In fact, Stratford Middle is Cooper’s fifth school in three years.
The children in Stratford have grown up together and are a tight-knit group. Not only do they have little interest in getting to know Cooper, but one of the boys, Aiden Scowcroft, gives Cooper the cruel nickname, “Whatshisface.” Another boy, Brock Bumgartner, just calls Cooper “kid.”
The only time the local boys pay attention to Cooper is when they need to even out the size of their soccer teams. Unfortunately, Cooper is not a great athlete. One time, instead of blocking a shot, he dodges the soccer ball to protect his GX-4000: an expensive smartphone that his parents bought him to bribe him into moving again. Upset at Cooper’s performance, Brock calls for new teams.
Cooper walks off the field and meets a girl named Jolie Solomon. Much to her parents’ chagrin, Jolie likes extreme sports and recently broke her wrist kiteboarding. She is the first local to learn Cooper’s real name. She also tells him a little about the town’s history. At the behest of billionaire Somerset Wolfson—the most powerful man for miles—the town changed its name from “Three Hills” to “Stratford.” Wolfson is obsessed with the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, whose hometown was Stratford, England. Wolfson bought the largest house in Stratford and created an adjoining museum to display his private collection of Shakespeare-related artifacts and memorabilia.
Cooper can see Wolfson’s property in the distance. With the mansion as a backdrop, Cooper uses his new phone to take a picture of Jolie. The moment he snaps the photograph, a blue spark comes out of the screen. He then spots a gray blob in the picture. Cooper realizes that something is wrong with his phone—and with Stratford.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Smartphone, Stupid Person”
In contrast to Cooper, Veronica Vega, his 16-year-old sister, fits into their new town right away. She is on both the volleyball team and the yearbook committee, and she finds a boyfriend in Brock’s older brother, Chad Bumgartner.
While Veronica’s GX-4000 works wonderfully, Cooper’s phone keeps malfunctioning. It clicks, beeps, honks, and whistles, and its pictures continue to come out blurry. When Cooper tries to adjust its settings, the phone shocks him. Although Captain Vega talks to tech support personnel for three hours to try and solve these issues, they’re never resolved.
At night, the noise from Cooper’s phone causes Veronica to pound on the shared wall of their bedroom. Mysteriously, Cooper is not even using his phone. When he shuts it down, though, he notices how the apps melt away into a swirl of particles. Cooper spots the outline of an amoeba in the particles, then a person.
On his way to school the next morning, Cooper meets Jolie, who is hopping along on a pogo stick. She wants to be an actress or an astronaut when she grows up, and she explains that both careers require physical health. She asks Cooper if he’s trying out for the annual 7th-grade Shakespearean play. Last year, they did Macbeth (1623), and it was so awful that people nicknamed it Macdeath. This year, they’ll perform Romeo and Juliet. Jolie would not mind doing a musical like Annie (1976), but The Wolf (Somerset Wolfson) pays for everything, and he insists on Shakespeare.
Jolie offers to let Cooper try her pogo stick; Cooper tries and promptly falls into some bushes. As he falls, he notices a silvery cloud leaves his phone. Brock and Aiden cheer on Cooper’s wipeout. Cooper has cuts and is a little hurt, but what really worries him is the glistening shape that flew out of his GX-4000.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Shakespeare Town”
Cooper is unsure he wants to be in Romeo and Juliet, but each student receives an audition time during lunch. Mr. Marchese—Cooper’s homeroom teacher and the play’s director—thinks Cooper should try out: Maybe it’ll help him fit in. Mr. Marchese tells Cooper that the year before Macbeth, the seventh grade performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), and a student battled through an asthma attack and saved the show. He became a school hero.
At 12:40 pm, Cooper goes to the gym to audition. Jolie, Aiden, and Brock are there, and Cooper admits he didn’t practice. Brock calls him “kid,” and Jolie scolds Brock for his dismissiveness. Jolie has been studying for a year and has memorized Juliet’s lines.
Aiden and Brock think Jolie will be Juliet, and when they hear another student recite the lines, “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun,” they think “sun” is “son,” and Juliet is pretending to be someone’s son. Jolie calls Aiden and Brock “dense.” Marchese compares Shakespeare’s lines to rap music, but Cooper is also confused by the lines and antiquated language.
Aiden and Brock make fun of Shakespearean words like “methinks” and “forsooth.” While Cooper’s audition goes badly, Jolie’s audition is superb. Her performance mesmerizes Cooper, and Brock jokes that Cooper is “in love” with Jolie. As Jolie’s audition ends, Cooper’s phone makes a siren noise.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Wrong Number?”
On Instagram, Cooper watches a video of Jolie falling off a BMX bike. Joyfully, she gets up and tosses off her helmet. Cooper thinks she’s “bananas,” but he also thinks she’s the most marvelous person he’s ever met. As he watches a video of Jolie climbing up a frozen waterfall, the phone says to Cooper, “Who speaketh thus?” (28). The swirling screen turns into an image of a boy near Cooper’s age. The boy wears a white shirt with puffy sleeves, a vest, bloomers, tights, and slippers. Cooper compares him to Robin Hood, and the boy laments his smartphone existence, “So long in darkness, trapped in this featureless ether” (29).
The boy introduces himself as Roderick Barnabas Northrop—Roddy, for short—and says he is a printer’s apprentice. In other words, he helps to make books. Roddy is in 1596, and Cooper is in 2018, which is why they speak differently. Roddy is amazed that Cooper lives in the United States, which he knows only as the “New World.”
Cooper explains a smartphone’s many features to Roddy. Overhearing him, Cooper’s mother tells him to get off his phone and go to bed. Cooper puts the phone face down on his mattress. When he picks it up again, Roddy is gone. Cooper thinks he imagined the interaction. After all, 21st-century phones can do countless things, but they cannot communicate with a person from a different century.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Ghost in the Machine”
Mr. Marchese tells the class of Wolfson’s background. Wolfson has earned billions from Canadian chromite exploration. As a college student, he acted in plays. Later, he collected rare folios of Shakespeare’s work. After he retired, Wolfson constructed a museum to “share” his passion for Shakespeare with the rest of the community.
Sleepy due to his phone drama, Cooper starts to doze. Mr. Marchese calls him out. A weary Cooper calls Wolfson “The Wolf,” and Marchese rebukes him. Brock hisses at Cooper.
Mr. Marchese continues his story about Wolfson, noting that the billionaire owns some of the earliest editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Wolfson also has clothes, tools, and illustrations from Elizabethan England: the period during which Shakespeare lived (Queen Elizabeth I, its eponymous monarch, ruled from 1558 to 1603). Wolfson also owns a detailed model of the Globe Theatre, which staged Shakespeare’s plays, and Wolfson supposedly possesses a secret gallery of illegally obtained Shakespeare memorabilia.
Cooper hears a voice call, “Coopervega!” Cooper responds by screaming, “I’m awake!” The voice is coming from his phone. Cooper hurries to the bathroom to take his very unusual call. There, he speaks to Roddy, who tells Cooper of his last moments alive before he died of the bubonic plague. This contagious disease first arrived in England during the 1300s, and it reappeared multiple times during the Elizabethan era. Flea-infested rats were the source of the deadly bacteria.
Cooper connects the dots. If Roddy is dead, then he cannot be calling Cooper from a different time. Rather, it must be that Roddy’s ghost is haunting Cooper’s phone.
Quoting a line from Romeo and Juliet, Roddy says that he feels like “fortune’s fool”: he is miserable inside the phone’s claustrophobic techno-universe. Cooper gets an idea. He points the camera at the wall and snaps a photo. A shining mist emerges and lingers in the bathroom stall before returning to the phone. The bathroom impresses Roddy, and he asks to see the local cathedrals, castles, and theaters. Cooper instead offers to show him Stratford Middle’s Gatorade machine.
Mr. Marchese enters the bathroom and scolds Cooper for using his phone during school hours. This is against the rules. Roddy calls the teacher a “knave.” Mr. Marchese hears something, but Cooper states he did not say anything. Cooper compares the phone to a time bomb but does not know what to do with it.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Insult App”
During breakfast, Cooper clutches his phone and wears earbuds. His sister thinks he is listening to music, but he is actually listening to Roddy compliment his kitchen. Roddy asks about servants and cooking. As Cooper thinks about explaining the microwave, he chokes on a Frosted Mini-Wheat. Veronica makes fun of him.
Veronica and Chad give Cooper a ride to school. Veronica implores him to act normally. Chad says his younger brother, Brock, had never heard of him. Cooper quips that Brock will remember if Chad mentions “Whatshisface.” During the ride, Cooper holds up his phone so Roddy can see Stratford. Roddy is impressed.
The school bus, the children, and the electric sign in front of the school all thrill Roddy. Since the sign announces a book fair, Roddy wonders if the kids come from royalty. In Elizabethan England, books were expensive and only owned by elites. The morning announcements over the PA system make Roddy think he is listening to God’s voice instead of the principal.
Cooper wonders if Roddy is a virus or the product of a hacker. Yet Roddy seems too genuine to be a virus or an app. Cooper concludes again that Roddy is a dead person whose ghost is somehow alive in the GX-4000.
During math class, Roddy snores loudly. Brock makes fun of Cooper. Roddy implores Cooper to stand up to Brock.
When Cooper’s health teacher asks him to name off the symptoms of an allergic reaction, Roddy responds by reciting graphic signs of the bubonic plague. Brock makes fun of Cooper again and, this time, even Jolie laughs.
Before gym class, Brock grabs Cooper’s phone. In the process, Brock catches a glimpse of Roddy, whom he dismisses as just “some dude” (53). Roddy promptly silences Brock with an insult. Cooper covers for Roddy by telling Brock and the others that he has installed a Sixteenth-Century Insult app on the GX-4000.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
One of the text’s primary themes, The Search for Belonging, appears in the first sentence, “Cooper Vega is invisible” (1). Cooper has no physical or emotional place in Stratford. His father’s military service means that Cooper has never experienced the feeling of being rooted in a single place. The book’s title reflects Cooper’s sense of alienation and undefined identity, and it echoes Aiden and Brock’s cruel nickname for him, “Whatshisface” (2). To most of the seventh graders at Stratford Middle, Cooper is not a specific individual; rather, he is an anonymous person. He has no connection to their community, so they see no reason to learn his actual name. Cooper is not merely a passive victim in search of belonging. He also learns to exercise agency as he seeks to integrate into Stratford. While he cannot control what other students think of him, he can stand up for himself and his right to have a recognized place within his new community.
Cooper makes several attempts to engage with others and climb out of his anonymity. Most of these attempts fail: Cooper fails miserably when he attempts to play soccer with the other boys, and he falls when he tries to use Jolie’s pogo stick. Even Mr. Marchese’s suggestion that he try out for the school play ends in embarrassment, though the text’s emphasis on Shakespeare foreshadows that the performance will help resolve Cooper’s problem of anonymity. Mr. Marchese tells him, “This is the Shakespeare town. What better way to fit in and make friends than to put yourself where you’ll be working shoulder to shoulder with every other kid your age in Stratford?” (19-20). Cooper’s connection to the town via the play will ultimately make him more memorable, though not for the reasons Mr. Marchese thinks.
Cooper’s troubles with Brock—the insufferable bully who functions as the novel’s primary antagonist—likewise provide Cooper with opportunities to practice self-assertion. Brock’s cruelty does not escape Roddy’s notice, leading the latter to exclaim, “Thou must speak up for thy honor, Coopervega!” (52). Belonging requires agency, and Roddy encourages Cooper to assert his voice and counter his tormentor. In this way, Roddy functions as a kind of coach and support for Cooper as he develops his self-confidence throughout the novel.
Roddy grounds the search for belonging in the theme of Linking the Past and Present. Korman uses dialogue to highlight how Roddy’s 16th century Elizabethan diction contrasts with Cooper’s 21st century idiom. The gulf between their two worlds produces humorous misunderstandings, as when Roddy praises the school bathroom as a “wondrous place, shiny white and adorned with divine sculptures” (40). Korman’s decision to include a character from the past also infuses Cooper’s experience of the seventh graders’ Shakespearean drama with cultural nuance and context.
Thanks to the Wolfson’s influence, Shakespeare is omnipresent throughout the town of Stratford. Whether in the physical landscape, in the form of Wolfson’s Shakespeare Museum, or in the middle school’s annual Shakespeare play, Korman merges the Elizabethan era with the present. The students’ incorporation of Elizabethan diction into their vocabulary, however flippant, allows for the persistent intrusion of archaic English into a verbal landscape dominated by smartphones and emoji expressions. Cooper’s falsehood about the Sixteenth-Century Insult app (while such an app really does exist) likewise bonds history with contemporary technology—and reveals the timelessness of a clever diss. From England’s Elizabethan Stratford to modern-day Stratford, USA, humans have always looked to reinforce their own sense of belonging by slighting and scorning one another. While Wolfson’s obsession with Shakespeare is eccentric, his attachment to the writer reflects the persistence of Shakespearean concerns.
Like Shakespeare does in plays such as Richard III, Hamlet, and Macbeth, Korman employs imagery to infuse intangible ghosts with substance and personality. For this reason, Korman makes a point of describing how Roddy looks both in Cooper’s phone and in the world. In Chapter 4, Korman supplies a detailed description of Roddy’s clothes, creating a tangible portrait of Roddy’s otherwise ghostly presence. When Roddy leaves the phone with Cooper’s help, the imagery used to describe his ghost becomes more elusive, with Korman defining him as a “glittering shape” (17) and elsewhere as a “glitter shape” (18). In short, Roddy’s spirit manifests as a porous sparkling silhouette whenever he is outside of the phone. Beyond just helping the reader to see Roddy’s near-translucent apparition, Korman’s imagery infuses the text with an important supernatural element. Next to the smallness of figures like Aiden and Brock, Roddy serves as a powerful counterweight: one that is both literally and figuratively larger than life.
Korman also uses the motif of wealth to comment on the ways in which art, through money, influences daily life. Wherever Shakespeare appears throughout this text, he symbolizes idolization; most prominently, he consumes the town of Stratford, which Wolfson effectively owns, because he is Wolfson’s idol. Indeed, Wolfson forces this locale to change its name from Three Hills to Stratford in exchange for his agreement to buy property there. This plot point embodies a subtle critique from Korman about the relationship between art and money: to wit, that it takes a huge amount of money for art to gain a foothold in daily life. It is only through his billions that Wolfson is able to impose himself and his favorite artistic obsession, Shakespeare, on this town. Moreover, by nicknaming him “The Wolf,” Cooper foreshadows (hints at) Wolfson’s later emergence as a ruthless figure with questionable moral character. For now, though, Wolfson exerts his control in more subtle ways, namely, by using his wealth to force-funnel other people towards the work of his artistic idol, Shakespeare.
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