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The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino ReviewAlec Wilkinson has written for _The New Yorker_ for years, and has ideas about who makes a good subject for his prose. "I do not believe that someone is a proper subject, or a laudable figure, only if he has made a lot of money or been a politician, an actor, a freakish public figure, or a criminal," he writes in _The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino_ (Random House). Indeed, Poppa Neutrino is none of these. He is a rafter, a football strategist, a street musician, and most of all an independent being who in his seventy-odd years has relentlessly done things his own way. This makes him a real hero, but it also makes him a nut; there is no reason the two cannot be conjoined, but his way of living his life is not one readers can expect to be completely comfortable with. "I wouldn't suggest that anyone regard Neutrino as a model," Wilkinson confesses. "It wouldn't be sensible. I don't even myself regard him entirely as one." Model or not, Neutrino is unique, and he is happy, and if you jettison materialistic standards (as Neutrino surely has) he is a success, and Wilkinson's delightful, amused, and affectionate portrait lets us in on the life of an eccentric who is as worth knowing in his way as any tycoon or president.
Neutrino's mother was an incorrigible gambler, and his father was a sailor who wasn't around. He flunked school and was thrown out of the Army because he enlisted at fifteen. He attended seminary and was thrown out, and then headed a group called the Salvation Navy, which traveled on waterways and made money by painting signs. He formed a ragtag musical group and got some money by it, but money wasn't important, just getting by was: "His poverty had exposed him again and again to the harshest torments, and yet he behaved as if no one could be as fortunate as he was to wake up with the whole day long to invent." He invented a football tactic by which a quarterback can send signals to a receiver after a play is underway, and part of the book is devoted to Neutrino's traveling to different schools to interest them in his revolutionary tactic, which seems to work but is just too different for the teams to incorporate (so far). The main arena for his invention, however, is that of rafting. "Neutrino was not the first man to build a raft and sail it across the Atlantic," writes Wilkinson. "He was the first to cross the Atlantic on a raft built from garbage." Neutrino may have spent his life as a drifter, but he did so literally, and made an adventure and an art form of it.
He also made it a spiritual quest. He created the Church of the Seven Levels, which incorporates his metaphysics based on triads. "There's only one thing in my soul," Neutrino says. "It's attack. Whether it's musical, spiritual, emotional, it's a multileveled attack. If you don't attack, you're just receiving all the blows of life." And yet paradoxically, he is on a non-offensive and introspective quest: "I am always asking myself, How can I become more involved, more passionate, and less vulnerable?" If Neutrino had taken his philosophy and energy and expended it in business, he would have been a millionaire many times over, but then he would just be one of millions of millionaires, and he would not have been the fascinating character profiled here. At the end of the book, Neutrino, elderly but hanging on after heart attacks, is still making rafts, perhaps one to go across the Pacific. Few who read this intimate and absorbing book will want to imitate his particular style of life, but there is much to admire about Neutrino's eccentricity. "I'm going out of this life as what I have worked and striven my whole life to be, a free man - free of possessions, free of greed, free of worry and strife. Free of anything superfluous."
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