picaresque

He sees himself as a picaresque hero in the novel that exists in his mind — and forces the rest of us to deal with it.

The sprawling, picaresque story uses 18th-century literary conventions to chronicle the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke, who takes possession of a tobacco farm in Maryland.

“Number Go Up” is a globe-trotting nonfiction picaresque that’s as much fun as you can have reading about financial malfeasance and blockchain scams.

The novel turns picaresque when Anna is whisked away to Hollywood on the thin pretense of an Ayn Rand television show.

Ninety-five years later, the novelist Miguel de Cervantes put this adventure novel on the imagined bookshelf of his gallant picaresque dreamer, Don Quixote de la Mancha — a true Californian if ever there was one.