Happiness is not exuberance, or contentment, or complacency, nor is it merely persistent good fortune — although that certainly helps, and Aristotle felt it was essential. But in his slim jeremiad, “Against Happiness” (Sarah Crichton Books, 160 pages, $20), the academic Eric G. Wilson seems to be working to find the narrowest definition of that complex state.

Not even the most moronic self-help books — and Mr. Wilson does go after these books, as if making sport of certified idiots proves a serious point in an argument — claim that happiness can be achieved through “number, price tags, and savings bonds,” by consumer slaves who trade “quality for quantity,” as Mr. Wilson suggests they do. What’s more, it turns out that Mr. Wilson is not really against happiness, either. What he’s against is stupidity, but “Against Stupidity” lacks the perverse, thought-provoking punch of “Against Happiness,” so he doesn’t reveal that he’s all for the Big H until around page 78, when he explains that, as most of us already know, true happiness exists in the mix of the “melancholy and joyful, sorrowful and ebullient.”

Carl Jung said it neatly: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Mr. Wilson doesn’t say it so neatly, but that’s really the gist of his book, and I don’t argue with the gist. What I could have done without is his pinning every fault of modern culture on “happy types.” I don’t know who these people are, but they apparently “reduce earth’s tragedies into safe clichés, lazy chitchat.” They are “bent only on bliss.” They “tune in to pundits thundering … pretend to understand and control barely bearable complexities.” They “recite Mary Stevenson’s ‘Footprints in the Sand.'” And then, according to Mr. Wilson, they read a best-seller and go out “beaming with all their might.”

See, these don’t sound like happy people to me; these sound like morons. (Frankly, some of them are even worse: bitter, envious, miserable morons. You cannot tell me that people who follow the adventures of Lindsay Lohan and feel compelled to blog about her habits or Jennifer Love Hewitt’s figure at vituperative length are happy people.) Mr. Wilson comes out strongly, again and again, against idiocy, which is a position I can support. But I still don’t see what’s wrong with happiness.

Mr. Wilson seems reluctant to acknowledge even his own happiness, although he does mention kicking decaying leaves and looking at crumbling walls in ways that sound awfully happy. My own Happiness looks sort of like Lord Ganesh, with Clark Gable’s smile and Eddie Murphy’s ass; Mr. Wilson’s Happiness looks a lot like every brooding teenager who’s ever strummed a guitar on the roof, ignoring the deeply mindless and actually painful fun being had at the family picnic below. What I don’t understand is why Mr. Wilson doesn’t write about how gratifying that misery can be, in its way. He describes his adolescent self, longing to “loll about in my dark bedroom.” He describes the brooding, “the tremulous air of failure … the brisk chirp of a mockingbird enhanced this perverse joy.” The sun’s glare startled him. He hated having to get up, having to play baseball and speak to the dolts around him. He “killed reverie and endeavored to succeed.” If that isn’t every adolescent enjoying his weltschmerz, I don’t know what is.

Mr. Wilson provides admiring portraits of a lot of great artists given to melancholy: Keats, Beethoven, Woolf. He also sketches the charm of John Lennon, the master, as he says, of “melancholy irony,” a quality that Mr. Wilson writes about with reverence. He seems less sure of what to do with Keats, who, Mr. Wilson writes, “remained sturdy in the face of his abiding woe … [but] never fell into … sorrow.” Mr. Wilson provides an honor roll of great people (he includes Ted Turner and Jim Carrey, as well as Hemingway and Goya, so it is an embracing kind of list) given to bouts of depression, which, if you are given to depression, might be cheering.

In the end, Mr. Wilson comes out strongly in favor of joy and ecstasy, of tolerating ambiguity, of embracing what is difficult and vexing. He celebrates courage and innovation — he believes that the broody, geeky caveman who stayed behind and mused while the cheerful, thick-necked brutes were killing dinner moved the culture forward, and who is to say he didn’t? — and he encourages appreciation for complexity as well as simplicity, and shadows as well as light. I can’t — and won’t — argue with any of that.

Ms. Bloom is the author, most recently, of “Away.”