Alec Wilkinson makes sense of it all in "The Happiest Man in the World " despite writing about someone whose "lavish and prodigal [life] does not easily compress." Wilkinson succeeds in part by skillfully shifting among his roles as a detached narrator, an interpreting presence, and a participating character.
He is an efficient chronicler for most of the book's first third, which covers Neutrino's first 71 years of various adventures, including a North Atlantic crossing in a raft made from found objects (or what some people would call "trash").
Neutrino knows how to take one thing and turn it into another: He started out as David Pearlman, changing his name at age 52. He is a person who generates reactions, and the usual responses to him -- doubt, disdain, curiosity, and awe -- may be shared by readers. But Wilkinson recognizes that "what appears to be the most random of lives is guided by an all but unyielding set of rules," including to never "face the storm passively." Wilkinson shows that with such a subject, a biographer needs to be both anchor and keel, to guide the way through a life "governed more by circles and wheels within wheels than by any linear design."
Wilkinson's technique echoes one of Neutrino's philosophies: that each situation in life can be understood as a triad. To Neutrino, life's first triad is to "participate, redirect, or leave," and he lives this triad again and again, changing his mind both from one goal to another (gambler, preacher, etc.) and between approaches within one pursuit (building one of his rafts, promoting an invented football play).
Similarly, a biography of a living person relies on a shifting triad that greatly influences the book's success: the life being revealed, the writer doing that work, and the contributions of the subject as source. Wilkinson -- and this book's readers -- benefit from Neutrino's "three deepest desires" triad of freedom, joy, and art, particularly the freedom that allows a candor that merges beautifully with Neutrino's unblinking self-awareness.
