The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone

by Shawn Rubenfeld

Failed academic Joshua Schulman is in a bad way. Grieving his mother’s death and the end of his marriage, he turns his avocation of retro video game collecting into a full-blown addiction. When a prep school in Eastern Iowa recruits him for a teaching job on the strength of a long-ago published online article from his grad school days, Joshua claims to still be chasing his PhD and gets hired. Moving from Brooklyn to Roll, Iowa (population 1,412), he finds that his troubles are just beginning.

From Joshua’s pursuit of a married faculty member to the school’s cultic obsession with a cat-and-mouse playground game called Splat, The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone is a hilarious romp steeped in strange places, where frenetic anxieties, secrets, and obsessions intersect.

224 pages, Paperback

Published May 18, 2021

Reviews

[Wesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one that I've been wanting to read for a while, at least for the past year. What piqued my interest most was the off-hand claim that retro video games would serve as the "central metaphor." I was curious to see how videos games might be intelligently woven into a narrative, which is something I've yet to see done (except perhaps Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge," where the weight and importance of games as a fundamentally new way to escape, a watershed moment in creating new realities worldwide, is expounded upon with nebulous, hypnagogic prose).

The idea that games, in this case, retro games, serve as a means of escape (escape from what? in this case, grief and emotional responsibility) IS an important element, exemplified by the repetitive nature of Joshua's return to them. Has a hard day at Fairbury? Comes home and powers on the Sega Saturn. Can't quite wrap his head around the Eggplant Conspiracy swirling around him? Why not 100-percent a Japanese bullet hell shooter. Snarky game and console references are also in abundance, like, for example, comparing a difficult situation with Natalie to a particularly niche and difficult game.

And all this is... fine. It's what Mr. Rubenfeld chose to write. He wrote what he wanted to read, and this is the result which I'm sure accords with his vision. But, as for me, I am a tad disappointed, as the central reason I chose to read this work seemed to fall by the wayside into greater obscurity as the novel went on. In all honesty, this "central metaphor" of video games could have been replaced with, well, just about any obsession. Why wasn't Joshua obsessed with baseball cards instead, or collecting a certain niche of film? Structurally, these obsessions would operate in the same manner as video games operate in "The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone." And, to me, this indicates that, to an extent, video games fail as a central metaphor for the work, since they are not so embedded in the structure so as to be unable to be divorced from it.

So fine, that's disappointing. But there are plenty of positives about this work. I found Rubenfeld's prose (dialogue excluded) to be very pleasant. It was tight, clear, vivid, and genuinely enjoyable to read, with not so much as a hiccup the whole way through. I imagine this is difficult to achieve for many writers, and I applaud him for it. As for the dialogue, the incessant snarkiness and banter between characters begins to wear down on the reader. Initially, I kinda liked this. Felt like a fun Pynchonian romp, especially in the PhD/Graduate setting. However, it began to dawn on me that this was how the dialogue was, quite literally, throughout the entire book. There never comes to a point of "settling," where characters cut the crap and really dig deep into these themes, such as grief and escapism. Ultimately, this left things feeling unsatisfying.

And speaking of unsatisfying, there's the conclusion. But less than the conclusion, the unsatisfying-ness speaks to all of the plot threads basically. I applaud Rubenfeld for taking the character-over-plot approach, as this at least made the book entertaining. However, the plot felt so underemphasized in the end, so the reader is unsatisfied. Honestly, all the Eggplant stuff (which should be extremely important because it's in the title) when all's said and done feels merely tacked on. The "core" of the book does feel like it's really in the relationship between Josh and Natalie, although even this, at times, feels a bit forced and tacked on (Natalie is a two-dimensional construction, and it often feels as if she was erected from the void as Josh approaches the town of Roll, almost as a sprite generated in a video game, just for the convenience of Josh to have something to play with once he's there and also for the reader to have some romance to haunt over). So without the Eggplant and without Natalie and without a central antagonist (Brandon Grey doesn't count, since he's so weak and minor as a character), what is there? I can't really say. By the end, it seems Josh has gone through some transformation because of the events that have passed, but it feels as if this "transformation" was always inevitable because that's how the book has to end, rather than being a natural conclusion based on the events that had passed.

I think, for me, what would fix all of this is, say, 200 more pages. I want to see Josh leave Fairbury and go off on another adventure, and have the book dig much deeper in its themes and the gaming metaphor within this new adventure, and have all the events at Fairbury be reflected, reinforced, and complicated by this new adventure. But alas, the book is already published.

[Ian Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shawn Rubenfeld's rollicking debut offers an enjoyable balance of laughter and pathos, plus more than a few classic game references. Its down-on-his-luck hero, Joshua Shulman, is an obsessive video game collector who's failed out of his PhD program. In his miasma he lies his way into a teaching job in the rural Midwest, where he pitches himself as "Almost Doctor J" and lies about having a dead wife to gain the sympathy of a married coworker. As with most liars in fiction, readers will eagerly watch him squirm around his exuberant boss and feign heartache over his supposedly dead wife while wondering if and when he'll be found out.

Plot aside, the novel's scenes are fast-moving and its dialogue punchy, with author Rubenfeld skillfully working in callouts to fan favorite games from the '90s and beyond (notable mentions include Jet Force Gemini, Earthworm Jim, and of course, the Kid Icarus reference in the title). His love letter to gaming nostalgia is strongest in the novel's crash-bang opening, with the Sega CD and Saturn getting the most page mentions throughout the novel. (As my own nostalgia mainly caters to NES and Sega Genesis, I couldn't help but infer a difference in our ages...). Rubenfeld's protagonist also evokes the more self-consciously aware neuroses of more than a few Woody Allen characters, and the novel itself carves out a well-deserved place in post-Roth Jewish fiction as its hero bumbles through his decidedly gentile Iowa town.

All told, Rubenfeld's novel is a fun read for gaming fans, cynical academics, and anyone who loves a good coming-of-age story.

[SofiaHof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy smokes the twists!!
The trials and tribulations Josh encountered in and outside of himself were easily understood through his divorce, the moving, a new job and games plot points. Killer read