How to Use picaresque in a Sentence

picaresque

1 of 2 adjective
  • His plots are loose-limbed and picaresque, more Gogol than Turgenev.
    — Patrick Kurp, WSJ, 5 Jan. 2024
  • Some critics accused him of recycling his picaresque plots and ideas, which at times seemed to verge on the nihilistic.
    — Harrison Smith, Washington Post, 14 Sep. 2017
  • Politics, commerce, romance, and mystery all play a role in a novel that can best be defined as picaresque.
    — Weston Williams, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 2017
  • But the implication is that the journey is picaresque and uneventful.
    — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 27 Apr. 2025
  • His tales are so picaresque that Jacki is unsure sometimes of the line between fact and embellishment.
    — David Rooney, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • More than that, Jacobsen has arranged her story in a kind of nonfiction picaresque novel.
    — Dick Teresi, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2017
  • Jim Harrison reviewed this picaresque tale of a young writer on the brink of success for The Times — and loved it.
    — Tina Jordan, New York Times, 26 Mar. 2021
  • Elements of picaresque comedy blended with pop culture references to create one of the most soul-satisfying shows of the year.
    — Kerry Reid, chicagotribune.com, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Our fearless heroine gets into all sorts of trouble, and what started out as a charmed vacation ends up becoming a horrific, picaresque nightmare.
    — Literary Hub, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Out at Ota’s shack in the woods, things continue to play out like a Beau is Afraid-type picaresque dark comedy of errors for Sato.
    — Andy Andersen, Vulture, 22 Feb. 2024
  • Reading this picaresque adventure story is a nearly psychedelic experience, made for those who like to read outside the box.
    — Marion Winik, Washington Post, 30 July 2024
  • Its astonishing energy comes from the contrast between its perky, picaresque structure and its muscular, high-flying prose.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 7 June 2019
  • These picaresque experiences found their way into many of his experimental novels.
    — René Ostberg, Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 May 2026
  • The novel turns picaresque when Anna is whisked away to Hollywood on the thin pretense of an Ayn Rand television show.
    — Ryan Chapman, Los Angeles Times, 14 Nov. 2023
  • What follows is a picaresque sprawl, a maximalist canvas of intricate, intimate detail.
    — Emma Alpern, Vulture, 2 Dec. 2025
  • Fielding's is a picaresque novel, an early literary genre which focuses on a roguish but lovable underdog hero on a series of adventures.
    — Emma Dibdin, Town & Country, 4 Apr. 2023
  • After Cabortes throws him out, Pattie makes his way to Monterey and has more picaresque adventures, including taking part on both sides of a minor civil war.
    — Gary Kamiya, SFChronicle.com, 1 May 2020
  • The journey to get there is appealingly plotless, following Dag and pals on a picaresque trip through subcultural SoCal in search of the killer.
    — Katie Rife, Vulture, 21 June 2024
  • The film might charitably be labeled challenging, more of a puzzle than a story, an invitation to the audience to do some work interpreting its bizarre picaresque journey.
    — Kyle Smith, wsj.com, 20 Apr. 2023
  • The White Tiger is a picaresque tale of an Indian man’s escape from poverty to business success, and of ambition being muddied by morality.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2022
  • Predictably, Armbruster's picaresque plot eventually finds a way of thawing the frosty impasse between the two men, but the road to reconciliation is pleasingly bumpy and steep.
    — Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter, 30 June 2019
  • Backed by his charming American wife, Medora von Hoffmann, the former cavalry officer made his life a picaresque ride across four continents.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Feb. 2026
  • There are picaresque detours, slapstick-heavy set pieces and a thick veneer of corporate-culture satire, mostly aimed at the Great Beyond’s overseers, each one a marvel of translucent forms and squiggly lines.
    — Justin Chang Film Critic, Los Angeles Times, 22 Dec. 2020
  • End of carousel Christian Dior, functionally a counterweight to these picaresque Nazi adventures, spends much of the series anxious, conflicted and stuck.
    — Lili Loofbourow, Washington Post, 14 Feb. 2024
  • You could be forgiven for thinking that this journey home will be a picaresque riot, a colorful flexing of the collective Pixar imagination, but there’s not much fun in this 13-year-old’s mind.
    — Damon Wise, Deadline, 12 June 2024
  • That premise launches the main character into a series of picaresque adventures primarily involving Suder's interest in and pursuit of jazz music.
    — John Warner, chicagotribune.com, 27 June 2017
  • Pennell tells this meandering, local picaresque tale with low-key emotions that rise very high through his distinctive eye for idiosyncratic behavior (as in the very first scene, of Frank sleeping off a bender on Lloyd’s pool table).
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2020
  • Special shout-out to cinematographer Vladimir Banduru, who beautifully captures the natural beauty of this picaresque location.
    — Pete Hammond, Deadline, 18 May 2026
  • Of course, in his picaresque travelogue of Texan political activism, O’Rourke is also telling his own story — as a careful listener and tireless avatar of all those who have fought against injustice, past and present.
    — Lee Drutman, Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2022
  • Two lithographs from 1827 by European visitors to Rio, capital of the new empire of Brazil, depict picaresque street scenes crowded with traders, monks, hawkers and slaves.
    — Jason Farago, New York Times, 18 Apr. 2018

picaresque

2 of 2 noun
  • For the first time, women were at the center of the picaresque.
    — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 11 May 2018
  • Who could achieve this not by appearing in a tragedy but while starring in a toasty picaresque?
    — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2024
  • Or at least, that’s the most generous reading of this perverse picaresque.
    — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Rushdie’s sprawling picaresque is, as the title promises, a riff on Don Quixote.
    — Erin Somers, The Atlantic, 6 Jan. 2026
  • On the surface, The Sympathizer is a mix of spy story and picaresque.
    — Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 14 Apr. 2024
  • The Summer Thieves is a picaresque adventure modeled on the work of Jack Vance.
    — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 20 Aug. 2021
  • This parodic picaresque finds Sturges at the zenith of his formidable powers to abrade and delight.
    — Washington Post, 31 July 2021
  • Suttree, somewhat of an indulgence, a romp, a Knoxville picaresque, closed out the Seventies.
    — Joy Williams, Harper’s Magazine , 14 Dec. 2022
  • At his or her best, a serial impostor lives out a real-life picaresque, a thrillingly disjointed string of dramatic episodes.
    — Sadie Stein, Town & Country, 26 Feb. 2017
  • The ländler dance in the second was robust and bumptious, with an undercurrent of darkness, and there was just the right amount of winking in the trio; the whole thing was a country fair picaresque.
    — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 24 Nov. 2024
  • But its two-hour runtime compressed Rice’s vampire picaresque in a way that undermined the book’s languid, Southern gothic pace.
    — Time, 27 Oct. 2022
  • It is called the novel of the picaresque, which is an adventure story where the main character travels around, usually with a sidekick, and has adventures.
    — Randy Blaser, chicagotribune.com, 8 June 2017
  • At least twice the book nods in the direction of Cervantes, who surely learned, by putting his Quixote through so many perils, that the picaresque carries perils of its own.
    — Louis Bayard, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2022
  • As chaos descended, her family scattered, and Kukielka embarked on a series of darkly picaresque adventures.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 15 Apr. 2021
  • Early on, Donnelly was often compared to her Aussie peer Courtney Barnett for her knowing picaresques.
    — Laura Snapes, Pitchfork, 16 Jan. 2026
  • In fact, the book is Cervantes’s satire of literary tropes (including the novel of chivalry, epic poetry, the pastoral novel, and, to a lesser degree, the picaresque).
    — The New Yorker, 18 July 2022
  • Berger's philosophically dense picaresque is a prime opportunity for a gifted solo performer.
    — F. Kathleen Foley, latimes.com, 3 Nov. 2017
  • His long-suffering, vegetarian girlfriend, Diana, is along for the ride, and the story is a freewheeling picaresque rich with character and joyful writing.
    — Oliver Staley, Quartz, 23 Oct. 2020
  • The Failure, a picaresque story about two guys who plan to rob a Korean check cashing store in order to finance the prototype for a ridiculous internet application.
    — Mike Postalakis, SPIN, 3 Aug. 2022
  • Le Chevalier’s manuscript—written in (eccentric) French, the lingua franca of diplomacy, one of his ephemeral métiers—has its own picaresque history.
    — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 20 June 2022
  • Ralph Breaks the Internet, like all good picaresques, meanders a bit during its journey, stopping to take several little detours that aren’t strictly necessary.
    — Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 21 Nov. 2018
  • Can a 21st-century writer of topical take-no-prisoners satires find happiness in the quaint but rollicking form of the 18th-century picaresque?
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 7 Mar. 2018
  • Brás Cubas, a deceased character born in 1805 who never achieved grace or glory, reflects on his picaresque life, multiple failures, and equally numerous delusions.
    — Farah Abdessamad, The Atlantic, 12 Apr. 2022
  • But the picaresque novel, as Cervantes would have understood it, is characterized by the first-person narration of a poor individual—the picaro—who relates his own misadventures and misdeeds.
    — The New Yorker, 18 July 2022
  • The book, a kind of urban picaresque following a sardonic, hyper-intellectual New York lawyer through her career, violent demise, and even afterlife, is the product of an astoundingly ambitious and patient creative process.
    — The New Yorker, 26 June 2024
  • That notion of American openness, of ever-fractalizing free will, coming up against the fickle realities of fate is the tension that powers Towles’ exciting, entertaining and sometimes implausible picaresque.
    — Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times, 5 Oct. 2021
  • This picaresque satire set in Russia's early aughts exposes the absurdity of totalitarianism when David, an investment banker who goes bust because of Enron, moves to Russia and is caught in a dizzyingly absurd plot.
    — Barbara Vandenburgh, USA TODAY, 10 Dec. 2022
  • Ibsen’s next work, Peer Gynt (1867), a stunning picaresque that lampoons Norwegian peasant life, provincialism, and greed, was also enthusiastically received.
    — Andrew Katzenstein, Harper's magazine, 16 Sep. 2019
  • Borrowing from the likes of Luchino Visconti with his eye for exquisite period detail, the great Stanley Kubrick turned to 18th-century literary adaptation in his epic picaresque of a young cad named Barry Lyndon.
    — Christina Newland, Vulture, 5 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'picaresque.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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