Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy Book

Just so there's no misunderstanding: I totally concur with Wilson's thesis, which is that "happiness" is not the natural human condition (indeed, it's possibly a recent invention), and suffering (or, as he keeps calling it, "melancholia" [*retch*]) is not only more valuable creatively, but closer to the human norm.

But wow, this book is just godawful.

First problem: he completely avoids the fertile relationship between capitalism, "happiness", and the pharmaceutical industry. This is a fatal cop-out: my guess is either he's boning some Prozac Nation grad-student waif, or Farrar, Straus and Giroux are in Big Pharma's pockets.

Second problem: his jubilant pop-wank theorizing (more like reassembling) leads him into into cross-eyed parallels between Herman Melville and Bruce Springsteen, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joni Mitchell. None of which make any sense.

Third (worst) problem: this English professor just sucks at composing sentences in English. How's this for a brilliant post-narcoleptic insight: "There is of course something soul-deadening about being overly in love with oneself. When a person views the world only through his own experience, he divorces himself from the polarized flow of existence, that persistent dialogue between self and other, familiar and unfamiliar..." Rakka rakka rakka, and that's about where clueless Narcissus joins his wobbly blue twin.

Or this: "Melville and Springsteen alert us to the energy of winter. We all know of this, the mind's winter. No leaves now hide the nakedness of the branches. We stare at the gnarled and exposed limbs. They shiver in the wind..." I can't go on. Just a shyte writer, worse than Norman Vincent Peale.

Never trust a professor with a soul patch.