The oboe, here, is a picaresque hero that darts through the 20-minute work with what seems an irreverent sense of humor.

In part this is the biological buoyancy of the picaresque hero - which Jerry, bouncing from girl to girl, certainly is - but it is also something headier.

Mr. Mailer is once again his own picaresque hero, witnessing man's first departure from the planet while preoccupied with such personal earthly problems as his weight and his wives.

His alertness, however, hardly resembles the quizzical interrogations of the puzzled but essentially self-effacing philosopher Palomar; it is the wide-awakeness of a picaresque hero on the make.

(7) The behavior of a picaresque hero or heroine stops just short of criminality.

Carefree or immoral rascality positions the picaresque hero as a sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of society.

Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel - tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane.

Since his first novel, "The Ginger Man," appeared to huge success in the 1950's, J. P. Donleavy has made a career out of creating picaresque heroes and relating their bawdy adventures.

Neither, I think, does Harry Niles, the picaresque hero (appropriately in this case; the word comes from the Spanish pícaro, or "rascal") of Cruz's new novel.

With her picaresque hero as guide, she is led into the strange society-in-miniature of orchid collectors and propagators.