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Eric G. Wilson has a point: Americans are obsessed with the notion of happiness. With the recent proliferation of Prozac prescriptions, feel-good mega-churches, motivational speakers and self-help gurus, Americans want that blithe spirit and we want it now. And there's reason to believe our collective quest is yielding disposition dividends. A recent Pew Research Center survey gleaned some startling results: 85 percent of Americans claim to be happy.

The findings, however, don't make everyone happy. In his new book, Against Happiness, author Wilson unloads a deeply philosophical polemic on the state of our sunshiny nation sure to generate controversy.

"[T]his quest for earthly bliss is at the core of the American soul," Wilson writes. "But we are also on the verge of apprehending something else again: this quest for happiness at the expense of sadness, this obsession with joy without pain, is dangerous, a deeply troubling loss of the real, of that interplay, rich and terrific, between antagonisms."

In Against Happiness, Wilson investigates the consequences of this "loss of the real," and he defends the necessity of melancholia. A literary scholar at Wake Forest University, Wilson surveys the cultural history of happiness in America in lucid and engaging prose. He shows again and again that our societal muse comes not from any quick feel-good fix, but rather from our trials and travails. The author is quick to point out that he is not a "psychotherapist marshalling evidence" to prove his thesis; instead, he calls himself a "literary humanist searching for a deeper life." He uses everyone from Herman Melville to Bruce Springsteen to Abraham Lincoln to illuminate his philosophical soap-box rant. Great ideas and everlasting art very often, he points out, emanate from time spent wallowing in the mire. As a nation, he cautions, we are drawing dangerously close to becoming a society of Stepford wives, self-medicated to the point of extinguishing what is often the wellspring of our creativity -- sorrow, hard times and depression.

In the end, Wilson, with caution, counsels us to embrace our dark side, to give in to that funk. But then again, for those who don't aspire to pen the great American novel or to become some brooding, tortured artiste, perhaps it's okay to simply go ahead and, as the old saying goes, have a nice day.