Phillip Roth and American Pie

Recently, I came across an ingenious article about Phillip Roth's novel "Portnoy's Complaint" and American Pie in a Literary magazine which I have conveniently forgotten the name of. They both deal with the sexual anxieties and hangups of the protagonist and the ways they try to disguise or fix these anxieties which then turn into sexual fetishisms of certain foods like "pie" or "liver."

They deal on a comic or tragic level with the various ways in which minorities try to become American, and how the effort to become American takes on an aggressively sexual tone that becomes profane. To profane America is to profane the symbol of America, the pie. It is, however, much better to rape the pie than a woman.

The author was making the obvious point that it is often the other woman, the foreign woman who is excluded from such a narrative, that the male character suffers from a fundamental misinterpretation of the situation at hand. The other woman, whether it is the mother or the wife, becomes obsessed with the idea of food, that the son or the husband should eat certain kinds of food and in this, preserves the ethnicity of the husband or son and therefore, prevents him from abandoning her on a somewhat sexual level.

I remember reading a short story by Milan Kundera in which the mother is obsessed that the son should eat. The mother's identity as a cook is so deeply imbedded into her identity as a mother also, that she has cooked the child in her womb and given birth to it when it was done and fit for life. The image of the character's mother constantly talking about eating properly while there is a war in Yugoslavia struck me as very true to life.

So, what I was going to ask was whether minority writers felt less envious of the dominant culture, less desirous of the forbidden fruits of the dominant culture now that the world had become multicultural or whether we found ourselves desiring more and more, multiple envies, multiple pleasures in our quest to reach fulfillment?