SOURCE: Buchen, Irving H. “Malamud's Italian Progress: Art and Bisexuality.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 2 (spring 1990): 64-78.

In the following essay, Buchen explores the relationship in Pictures of Fidelman between life as an artist and the protagonist's final embrace of bisexuality.

Every experience that is not converted into a voluptuous one is a failure.

—E. H. Cioran. Precis de Decomposition (1949)

Pictures of Fidelman begins in Rome, moves north to Milano, makes a temporary stop in Naples, and concludes in Venice. In the process Fidelman spiritually travels from critic to painter to craftsman; from a self-centered, grasping often obsessive son of a bitch to a lover of men and women; from a celebrator of sublime art to a witness to life and art. The work is “A Painter's Progress” (169)¹ and circular; it returns Fidelman at the end to where he started, America, although much altered. The entire journey is informed...