Eating Across Borders: Dietary Politics in "Goodbye, Columbus" and Absurdistan

Abstract:This paper compares the dietary politics of Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" (1959) and Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (2006). "Goodbye, Columbus" shows characters who can never fully eat without worry, whose dietary behavior marks the rigidity of their lives and the predetermined trajectory of their class identity The cultural anxieties that underpin Roth's characters' diets are noticeably absent from Shteyngart's novel, yet in each story characters' appetites reveal nuanced class and racial implications of their respective positions. Misha, through his excessive alimentary and cultural consumption, can transgress social and geographic borders with ease; for Roth's characters, dietary anxiety exposes a fixed social class with limited geographic mobility By juxtaposing these two works, we can see how diet becomes a way for Roth's characters to perform an upper-middle class whiteness, but it also tethers each character to the position into which they were born. In contrast, Shteyngart's Misha rejects this type of performative dietetics while, in fact, using food to perform his own ill-conceived cultural ideals.