The wish to recover in fiction something of the boisterous illogic and of the impetuous action which had once entertained our ancestors in the Spanish, French, and English picaresque novels has spurred several Englishmen and a few Frenchmen to attempt a revival of the genre among us…. Romain Gary, soon after he made a startling entry into literature with one of the most moving books written about the underground in eastern Europe, Education européenne (1945) [A European Education], declared to a literary weekly, La Gazette des lettres, on October 12, 1946: the 'modern novel will be picaresque or it will not be at all. Picaresque, like a fresco teeming with adventures, motion and swarming characters, and also with optimism.'… He was determined to reintegrate laughter into fiction. Even more than his plea for the preservation of African elephants, Les Racines du ciel [(1956) The Roots of Heaven], which blended some...