Eric G. Wilson is a sad man. He’ll tell you so himself. He says he’s born to the blues — the type of morose soul who prefers solo walks through mossy forests to group outings to the mall. He cherishes things that are old and steeped in decay over things that are new and shiny. He has an immense reverence for the inherently macabre traits of life itself. As a melancholy soul, Wilson, author of Against Happiness (Sarah Crichton Books, $12 at Amazon.com), is fed up with the American Happiness Industry, that chirpy machine that informs us that our true dual nature — up and down, back and forth, elated and depressed — is by definition defective and that we are entitled to feel nothing but unbridled joy at all times.

The American Happiness Industry, you ask? Surely you’ve heard of it. It’s linked arm in arm with Big Pharma, pumping experimental mood-altering drugs into the perturbed of all ages. It keeps the advertising world humming along on our borrowed cash. It keeps us only marginally informed of the, uh, uncomfortable goings-on in the rest of the world (”People don’t want to read about about that over their morning Cheerios!” is a cliché-but-true newsroom refrain that keeps certain stories off the front page). It keeps that little bouncing smiley-faced idiot knocking down prices at Wal-Mart. It keeps the self-help-book industry afloat in rivers of its own psychobabbling nonsense. It keeps that smug bastard Bob on the television, peddling his little blue pills while he has that slightly desperate plastic grin plastered on his face.

The American Happiness Industry is annoying, sure, Wilson argues, but it’s much more sinister than that. Eradicate melancholy and you eradicate the creative spirit, the pulsing foundation of life itself — which is inherently based on decay, destruction, and general lowness of spirit. After all, without the depths of despair, how are people to measure the soaring heights of joy?

Wilson takes care to ensure that no readers mistake his defense of periodic melancholy — the yin to life’s yang — as an endorsement of untreated clinical depression. Quite the contrary, he argues. Whereas depression is a physical and psychological malady that levels a person completely and needs treatment (especially in cases in which the depressive person in question takes to substance abuse of any kind), melancholy is the periodic downtick in mood during which most people can see the world for what it is: complicated, dying, impossible, beautiful. If low moods are eradicated, we are doomed culturally, Wilson argues. Instead, people should learn to embrace and navigate their foul moods, because they can often lead to bouts of creativity and self-identification that blissful happiness can’t possibly afford.

Here’s a little taste of what Wilson is getting at:

Surely some of you have felt the same way that I do. You have turned sullenly from those thousands of glowing, perfect teeth lighting the American landscape and slouched to the darkness — the half-lighted room, the twilight forest, the empty café. There you have sat and settled into the bare, hard fact that the world is terrible in its beauty, indifferent much of the time, incoherent and nervous and resplendent when on certain evenings, when the clouds are right, a furious owl swooshes luridly from the horizon. You feel the sweet pressure from behind your eyes, as if you would at any minute explode into hot tears. You long to languish in this unnamed sadness, this vague sense that everything is precious because it is dying, because you can never hold it, because it exists for only an instant.

Wilson cites artists and poets throughout history (one nit to pick: this selected history is heavily Eurocentric) to make his case. The world’s greatest art came from people who battled with their own inner demons of self-consciousness, doubt, faithlessness, misanthropy, and confusion. But these acknowledgments of the darker side of life always gave way to transcendent works of beauty and light, for the true humanitarian understands that there is no life without death, no growth without decay. To ignore the darkness inherent in all things is to live a facade, Wilson argues. Just buy your McMansion and refill your anti-depressant prescription and never let yourself feel your funk when it comes, he says. You’ll be living as a shell of a human, never realizing the full spectrum of your emotional life, and thus never feeling true joy at anything.

Wilson’s book offers comfort to fellow melancholics (hand raised here), who struggle with the guilt they likely feel when they lapse into periods that are tinted blue or darker. And while most of what Wilson says resonates strongly, there are some points at which his arguments get a little wordy (okay, in all seriousness, this is a wordy book full of synonyms for the same sentiments) or a little inconsistent. In my mind, Wilson is least effective when he is trying to define the things that a melancholy person abhors — specifically suburbs and malls because they are new and gleaming and uniform. He argues that he enjoys standing in front of his 1920s house, which is situated in the oldest neighborhood in his city, and just observing the domestic decay an old house offers. It’s nothing like the mauve-bricked monstrosities in the suburbs; all those houses look the same, he says.

But to posit such a thing is to ignore history altogether. Surely at some point in the early party of of the 20th century, his 1920s house in the city’s oldest neighborhood was part of a suburban expansion on the edges of his city, much as the quaint bungalows of Midtown Memphis once occupied the “suburbs” of Memphis at one time before the legs of the interstate stretched into what’s currently known as East Memphis. Wilson wants us to recognize that all things that are new will one day die; that that is the nature of life. But I submit that he is being shortsighted in slighting the New, for all things that are dying were at one point new, and there is just as much beauty in the dying as there is in the newly created that will inevitably die. He maligns suburban malls for being repositories for all things uniform, but surely he has heard of the extremely macabre Deadmalls.com, where those gleaming meccas of commercialism have become crumbling monuments to the fickle nature of humanness, and the doomed-from-the-beginning South China Mall, whose very existence sounds like a zombie movie waiting to be filmed.

In other words, my melancholy nature leads me to be deeply ambivalent about Wilson’s argument while believing he’s on to something important. And I encourage everyone to consider the beauty of melancholia and really embrace those days that move like molasses, when all the songs on the radio are depressing, when the world moves around us like synapses firing, and all we want is to sit and be for a time, at least until we can break through to the inevitable light on the other side.