The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Munch Case, by Robert Buckeye
reviewed by Matthew L. McAlpin

Robert Buckeye. The Munch Case. Amandla (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2003. 165 pp. Paper: $18.00.

Awaiting electroshock therapy, Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream, begins to narrate a series of broken fragments. These fragments juxtapose memory and presence, art and life, bourgeoisie and bohemia. They serve as a prelude to the ensuing novel, encapsulating the form, themes, and images of Robert Buckeye’s The Munch Case, a novelization of Edvard Munch’s early career. But The Munch Case is no stale historical novel. It is a translation of Munch’s work across media: from painting to the novel, from the canvas to the text block. It is the novel Munch would have written about himself were he to have written instead of painted. Descriptions are composed like Munch’s paintings, “shaft[s] of moonlight on water.” Details reappear with obsessive frequency: the Seine, face-as-mask, the color blue, large eyes, aesthetics, and alcohol. In a beautiful metafictional gesture, Munch develops, in conversations and reflections, the aesthetics that govern the composition of the novel. The book becomes a piece of the fin de siècle decadence it depicts, down to the tropes: tuberculosis, red lips and rogue, the judgmental psychoanalyst and the suffering artist’s obsession with sex, alcohol, and the night, obsessions that fuel the artist even as they threaten to destroy him. “Some days I felt I had lived more life than life could bear . . . Until I had had too much. . . . By now I knew the price.” The powerful juxtaposition of fragments drives us deep into Munch’s anxiety, into the painter’s extreme sensitivity: Buckeye’s Munch is no Caspar David Friedrich, staring at the edge of nature. Instead, he is a man at the edge of his sanity, staring at himself.