cover image In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac

In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac

Mark Kingwell. Crown Publishers, $25 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60535-6

Smoothly splicing together personal narrative, philosophical inquiry and historical analysis, young Canadian academic and frequent Harper's contributor Kingwell (Dreams of Millennium) deconstructs popular conceptions of happiness and presents an invigorating alternative vision of the good life in this witty and incisive cultural critique. Kicking off his personal pursuit of felicity with a week-long stint at a happiness seminar in western Massachusetts, Kingwell plays guinea pig in a caustic examination of the self-realization industry. In another amateur experiment, he locates a month's supply of Prozac--he is not depressed, and the drug has not been prescribed--and doses himself, investigating the pharmaceutical approach to happiness. Though these two episodes make for amusing storytelling, the insight they yield is slight. It is Kingwell's more abstract reasoning on consumer culture--in selling happiness, advertising actually manufactures unhappiness; in urging self-affirmation, therapeutic programs push empty solutions--that succeeds best. Looking to Plato's The Republic, Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and Epictetus's Enchiridion for inspiration from the longest-lived happiness manuals, Kingwell, like the ancients, finally concludes that happiness is not a life of hedonistic abandon but rather one of eudaemonistic fulfillment: ""the possession of virtuous character and the performance of virtuous action."" Grandiose as this may sound, Kingwell wears his learning lightly, and his spirited defense of the life worth living is marred only by an occasional smugness of tone. Riding a wave of Jerome Kern lyrics, rehashed personal gossip and analysis of the movie Shall We Dance, he coasts home on the story of his own struggle for happiness as a junior scholar angling for tenure. (July)