SOURCE: Malin, Irving. “Portrait of the Artist in Slapstick: Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 24, no. 1 (fall 1980): 121-38.

In the following essay, Malin suggests autobiographical elements in Pictures of Fidelman that allow Malamud to explore his role as an artist.

Although many critics have written about Bernard Malamud as an American-Jewish author—I plead guilty to this kind of grouping—they have not seen that he is also concerned in his fiction with the relationship of art and life. In the recent Dubin's Lives we have, for example, the double meaning of “lives”; the hero is a biographer-critic who cannot easily reconcile art and life; he persists in regarding his own middle age as a troubling artwork; he is at times an “autobiographical character.”

Malamud's earlier novel, Pictures of Fidelman (1969), demonstrates that Malamud is “obsessive” about the functions of art and criticism...