The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkinson

There can be something off-putting about elegant writing. Certainly, there is satisfaction and excitement to be had from reading ideas expressed clearly yet subtly - a craft that Wilkinson, 27 years a writer at the esteemed New Yorker, has honed to a high degree. But elegant writing rarely concedes much to content.

The content in question here is the life story of Poppa Neutrino, an eccentric Beat-generation survivor who, in a life utterly filled with far-out experiences and activities, managed both to devise a revolutionary American Football play, and to cross the North Atlantic on a raft made out of rubbish he found on the streets of Manhattan. Quite a guy. So it is a little underwhelming that Wilkinson's style is so consistently considered, and not more wild infuriating desperate unpredictable funny odd cosmic random unpredictable infuriating infuriated – more challenging. And not in a trite way, but in a way that would correlate the reader's experience of the text more directly with the experience of those who met the positively phenomenal Neutrino.

The Happiest Man in the World is well worth reading for a wise account of an exceptionally out-there life. But for all his evident commitment to his subject and to his writing, you can't help regretting that Wilkinson didn't try that little bit harder to get with it, daddio. [RJ Thomson]