Malamud particularly liked [a] Robert Scholes piece in Saturday Review of 10 May 1969, where the stories were described as ‘six comic Stations of the Cross’.

"[2]Aside from Arthur Fidelman, the only character that appears in more than one story is Bessie, his sister, a mother of five living in Levittown, who occasionally sends him money.

[3] First published in the Spring 1958 Partisan Review and later included in Malamud's first short story collection The Magic Barrel, Fidelman arrives in Rome wide-eyed with wonder ("a Bronx boy walking around in all this history" (18)),[3] but is repeatedly accosted by eccentric beggar Shimon Susskind, "a Jewish refugee from Israel, no less" (14).

[3] First published in the Winter 1962 Partisan Review and later included in Idiots First; Fidelman moves into a studio with Annamaria Oliovino, whom he is attracted to though she repeatedly mistreats him.

[3] First published in the August 1963 Playboy and later included in Idiots First; Fidelman finds himself working as a toilet-scrubber in a whorehouse, at the mercy of Scarpio and Angelo, who convince him to forge Titian's Venus of Urbino in exchange for his freedom.

Fidelman, now living in Florence, Italy, tries to complete a painting that has tormented him for years, of himself and his mother, and though he finally manages to create a masterpiece, it does not convey what he had hoped it would.

Malamud deftly weaves continuity into his story, referencing characters from earlier stories, as in this passage describing the face of his mother that he continually paints only to scrape off in vexation: "I've made her old and young, and sometimes resembling Annamaria Oliovino, or Teresa, the chambermaid in Milan; even a little like Susskind, when my memory gets mixed up, who was a man I met when I first came to Rome" (107-08).

There he thrust an Italian, Frank Alpine, into the thick texture of Jewish life, where he functioned as a kind of perspective by incongruity, a green pepper in the chicken fat.

And perhaps it is this poor return for his years of expatriation that robs Pictures of Fidelman of the moral breadth, the grand lugubriousness, that distinguishes Malamud's best stories.