The Happiest Man in the World Alec Wilkinson Vintage, 301pp, £8.99

Poppa Neutrino (né William David Pearlman) first found international fame sailing across the Atlantic in a raft fashioned from refuse collected from the streets of New York. The journey lasted more than 60 days and came perilously close to failure, and when he and his crew finally washed up on the shores of Ireland, their ferry looked like "a spectre, a ghost ship", or a "vessel from the end of the world". This quest is just one of many schemes the roving adventurer has embarked on, as the New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson discovered when he spent several years trailing in his erratic wake.

Neutrino, now in his seventies, came from "motley bloodlines" and was raised by his hard-gambling mother, Vilma McDaniel, and his aunt Lucille - a "hard-shell Baptist". He decided to give himself his new name after coming close to death from the bite of a Mexican dog. A neutron is an itinerant particle so tiny that it can hardly be detected, one that has a capacity for unremitting movement. Fittingly, Neutrino's tale is a "long poem to the random life".

Wilkinson pieces together Neutrino's "lavish and prodigal past" from interviews with Poppa and various friends, lovers and travelling companions. There are inevitably gaps and digressions, yet what emerges is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary life, populated by characters called things like Oats and Manhattan Everyman. In between countless jobs (and a few spells in prison), Neutrino found time to found the First Church of the Fulfilment - "the only church in the history of the world that didn't know the way"; to lead an outfit called the Salvation Navy; and to tour in a band called the Flying Neutrinos (or "Latrinos"), which once made $10,000 playing on the New York Subway. While Wilkinson was getting to know him, he was also touting the "Neutrino clock offensive" - an American football play he dreamed up on the back of a napkin.

In many ways, Neutrino embodies the American dream: he is dauntless, has enjoyed dizzy-ing success and spectacular failure, and still "ardently imagines what he might be". Yet he is also the antithesis of modern American values. The "freedom" that he seeks is to be free of possessions. He is a "wanderer, an exile, an outcast, a Bedouin in the wilderness of the republic": a "modern-day Aborigine" who has never lived in one place for more than a year, and gives away everything he owns.

And yet, for all his professed optimism, the book's title is somewhat misleading. The final section, in which he prepares for a second raft voyage, this time across the Pacific, is a long, meandering account of delays, prevarication and self-doubt. For someone who claims to be happiest as a "lone wolf", Neutrino seems anxious for company on his planned voyage. He is neither a mythical hero nor a character from a parable, but a human being with ordinary vulnerabilities.

The tale's many literary antecedents are obvious: Wilkinson has chosen an epigraph from Melville, and name-checks numerous precursors: Don Quixote, Tom Jones and "a few of the figures who wander the desert in the Old Testament". Neutrino himself crossed paths with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s. But there is nothing derivative about Wilkinson's narrative. In the hands of a more flamboyant writer, the story might have been overcooked, but his understated style suits the extravagance of the tale; his prose is lyrical, but he embarks on descriptive tangents sparingly. There are flaws: sometimes the imagery is a little clunky, and one wants a stronger impression of Neutrino's physicality, to break up some of the long quoted chunks of philosophising. His writing, however, is buoyant and suffused with passion for its subject, and this enthusiasm is contagious.

Wilkinson's point is that modern protagonists do not have to be politicians or actors, or to have made fabulous amounts of wealth - nor do they have to be freaks or criminals. The "eccentrics, the odd-beaters, the benign connivers, the showmen, the pilgrims and the raffish self-glorifiers" also deserve their place in the pageant.

Many might dismiss Neutrino as a run-of-the-mill crackpot, forever falling in with bizarre cults and having to be bailed out by responsible, moneyed friends. Nowadays someone like him would never escape childhood without a "label and a prescription", but this is precisely why he is exotic and why his tale is romantic and engaging. Neutrino is "the raucous, rambunctious, disorderly and exuberant interior life risen up and given feet" - an incarnation of what we might imagine doing if we stepped outside of ourselves but, of course, most of us never will. It is an escapist fantasy but, amazingly, not a fictitious one.

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