The best books about mavericks and oddballs

I read voraciously as a kid and this is one of those early books that influenced me most.

Once I’d started writing fiction—late, in my thirties—I focused on mavericks and oddballs. They don’t match our familiar categories. They’re exotic - richly different. They may have intriguing and startling inner lives. They have a deal to say about identity, sense of self, and motive. They also highlight convention, albeit in negative image. And they share a stance with writers themselves, who are often detached, peering in on life from the outside. 

It might have been many other writers, but it was Camus (through The Outsider and The Fall) who first impressed me with confessional voice and narration. It’s all established in the opening lines, slapping you with Meursault’s chilling, oddball indifference. “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

My reading follows the pleasure principle. This book is a joy—exuberant, funny, touching, outrageous. It’ll stay a friend for life (along with The Third Policeman).

Jack Crabb—“either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions”—now aged 111, and sole white survivor of Little Big Horn, recounts his first thirty-odd years as a Forest Gump of the Wild West, whose acquaintances include Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane, General Custer. 

At ten, Jack is adopted by the Cheyenne (they call themselves ‘Human Beings’, to distinguish themselves from the savage, white settlers). From then on our scoundrel anti-hero bounces between the two cultures—white and First Nation—finding himself an oddball in both. 

Treat yourself.

It comes out of a Germanic tradition, including Hoffmann’s dark, supernatural tales, but Perfume seemed wonderfully original, freshly foul, and captivatingly disgusting. It’s a book that makes its own universe and sets its own rules. It’ll ask you to lend your sympathy to a demented serial killer. And you may well consent.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born amongst the discarded fish guts, in the gutter in an Eighteenth century, Parisian market. In a world that stinks, he lacks a body odour himself, but grows up obsessed with the aroma of things becoming a genius perfumier. But his obsession carries terrible costs for those he meets, and finally for himself.

An oddball book about an oddball character.

Training as a psychologist, I read Leon Festinger’s study “When Prophecy Fails” describing his research study infiltrating a doomsday cult whose believers expected to be rescued by flying saucers from the planet Clarion. Alison Lurie then novelised this scenario in Imaginary Friends. Here we meet a parade of oddballs: psychologists whose everyday normality is deceit, pretending to be delusional themselves, spying on other’s lives: a group of pious, well-meaning souls awaiting extra-terrestrial salvation: a cult leader who receives and relays the group’s alien guidance: the lead researcher who claims to be possessed by the spirit of “Ro of Varna”.

It’s a deft and clever satire that shows the conventions of oddness, and the oddness of conventions.

Meet Fevvers, twice as large as life, the Victorian circus high-wire artiste, Cockney Venus, winged, part bird, part human, found abandoned newly hatched from a great egg, on the steps of a brothel, as she recounts her sprawling stories within stories, of pigs that read and write, of being painted by Toulouse Lautrec, being courted by the Prince of Wales, dining with Colette. “Everywhere she went rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported…”

It’s drunk on language, a lavish, surreal, exuberant, funny, earthy, erotic, brilliantly imaginative work. Enjoy.