January 24, 2008
Against Happiness review
The new issue of Bookforum is online, and it contains my review of Eric G. Wilson's Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. The review begins:
Over the last decade, at least, authors have come out against bioethics, depression, capitalism, love, Christianity, common sense, Freud, and consolation, among any number of other subjects. Blame it on Susan Sontag. The polemical muscle of her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” gave license to an essayistic discourse that, in announcing outright its position, is far more assertive than the open-ended, digressive ruminations of, say, Montaigne (“On cannibals,” “On repentance”) or the amused musings of Charles Lamb (“On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged”). Few agitators have wielded the polemical pen as well as Sontag, though, and in recent years, the familiar essay has largely become either a solipsistic memoir or a hectoring attempt at contrarian thinking. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy is no mere coruscating squawk, but rather a lively, reasoned call for the preservation of melancholy in the face of all-too-rampant cheerfulness.
To read the rest, click here