It is a short but laborious book, and it begins: “Ours are ominous times. Each nervous glance portends some potential disaster. Paranoia most mornings shocks us to wakefulness, and we totter out under the ghostly sun. At night fear agitates the darkness.”

It’s a hilarious opening, and you smell parody here as the author ticks off the ominous things that shock him awake in the morning — the holes in the ozone, the extinction of animal species, global warming, nuclear arms, the threat of human extinction — and then you come through a dark thicket and over a field of jagged rocks and you find his thesis: American obsession with happiness, typified by the widespread use of antidepressants, is eliminating melancholia, the wellspring of creativity, the source of so much great art and poetry and music. Kafka, Hart Crane, Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams, Mark Rothko, melancholics all, so why shouldn’t we accept our own bleakness and take long walks in the winter woods and look at the gnarled limbs of trees and struggle with the inscrutable and accept the beauty of permanent turmoil?

It’s a good old-fashioned broadside against American optimism — the mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness, the superior man exults in his gloom.

The author is a gloomy man who tried jogging, yoga, tai chi, Frank Capra movies, smiling, good grooming and eating salads, and finally decided to embrace his gloominess. This makes him an odd duck in America, a land of “crazed and compulsive hopefulness,” settled by seekers of utopia, a Promised Land that quickly became a shopping mall where “the typical American, the American bent on discovering happiness through securing stuff,” consumes Paxil and Prozac, Ambien and Botox, while seeking the instant gratification of the cellphone, the BlackBerry, the Internet, smiley faces, churches that are “happiness companies,” hugging and yearning for “up with no down.”

Suburbia gets thumped hard, of course — “pretty things suggest a kind of emptiness,” everything “safe, clean, predictable,” like Wal-Mart, gated communities, prefab houses, freeways, convenience stores, Hallmark cards, franchise restaurants, the Lifetime channel (one is startled to come across the names of Norman Rockwell and Norman Vincent Peale and the Book-of-the-Month Club and Jell-O and Cool Whip — the man is swinging his softball bat at ghosts!), all the attempts to iron out life’s rough edges and to fend off melancholy, “the wakeful anguish of the soul,” as Keats put it, which is essential for mental health.

It’s only right that the tide of inspirational books should yield to the occasional depressional one — for every humorist, a dishumorist, a man who runs his nails down the blackboard and makes everyone’s hair stand up, though we humorists would note that you have to work hard to get a laugh and that dishumor is tyrannical: you need only say out loud, “How can you people stand around here and enjoy yourselves while the world is falling apart?” and all conversation ends. The dishumorist brings a long face to the party and you are forced to ask, “What’s wrong?” And he whispers: “These are ominous times. I sense disaster. I wake up feeling paranoid. The sun was ghostly today. And now fear agitates the darkness.” O.K., pal. Thanks for sharing.

“I often wonder if America would be better off, would be a richer and deeper nation, if it took seriously Jung’s version of Jesus,” Professor Wilson writes — one of those oft-wondered things you doubt get wondered that often — and we get some Jung, some Joni Mitchell, some John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, some bits from old lectures on Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Crane and Melville, and of course Beethoven. Had psychiatry been practiced in the 18th century, we might have been deprived of the Eroica Symphony.

Wilson is a true romantic. He loves beautiful ruins. He loves his chilly house with its crumbling bricks and rotting roof, its “sweet decadence.” He misses the old Times Square, “a seductive mixture of divas and drugs, gloriously dilapidated buildings and grim rings of illegal sex.” The new Times Square has “the drab predictability of a suburban mall.”

“The greatest tragedy is to live without tragedy,” he writes. “To hug happiness is to hate life. To love peace is to loathe the self. The blues are clues to the sublime. The embrace of gloom stokes the heart.”

Wilson clarifies his opposition to antidepressants later. He is not opposed to them in the case of severe depression, only in the case of mild to moderate depression. All right, thanks for that. The distinction between melancholia (good) and depression (bad), Wilson writes, is simple: depression is passive, melancholia is turbulent. Defending depression of any sort on the grounds that Beethoven suffered from it is awfully close to defending tuberculosis on the grounds that it sharpened John Keats’s vision or arguing that you shouldn’t clean up violent, drug-ridden neighborhoods because so many brilliant jazzmen came from there. And look at the long list of gin-soaked writers — practically the entire pantheon of the 20th century — so tell Hazelden to go soak its head.

To argue for melancholia as a force for creativity prompts the question, Why isn’t this a better book, since the author is so miserable? And a Minnesotan reading Wilson, a North Carolinian, on the tonic effect of melancholy winter has to smile.

Which brings me to the effusive thank-yous at the end of this book. Wilson thanks his “wonderful” agent, Bridget, for her encouragement; and his editor, Sarah, for her “brilliant” insights; and his kind friends and his patient parents and his inspiring wife. Why this Kodak moment at the end, the spritzing with Champagne, the presentation of bouquets? It’s so out of character for a guy who is awakened by paranoia to be thanking the folks who enabled him to write a not very good book. Maybe he should’ve worked more on his house.

Folic acid 'helps to keep sperm healthy'

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The study suggests the father's diet could also play a role in the development of healthy children

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A folate-rich diet may protect men against producing abnormal sperm and children with genetic abnormalities, a study suggests.

The vitamin is traditionally recommended for pregnant women but scientists now believe the father's diet could also play a role in the development of healthy children.

The study published in the journal Human Reproduction found that men who consumed a higher than recommended daily amount of folate and folic acid had lower frequency of abnormal sperm.

Researchers in California analysed sperm samples from 89 men and questioned them about their daily intake from both diet and vitamin supplements.

The results showed that men who consumed between 722 and 1,150 micrograms had a 20-30 per cent reduction in abnormal sperm.

In the UK, the daily recommended amount for adults is 200 micrograms per day and 400 micrograms for women trying to conceive and until the third month of pregnancy.

Folic acid is known to help protect against the development of spina bifida.

Folate is a water soluble B vitamin that occurs naturally in food such as pulses, beans and spinach while folic acid is its synthetic form.

Lead researchers Professor Brenda Eskenazi, Director of the Centre for Children's Environmental Health at the University of California, said: "In previous studies, we and others have shown that paternal micronutrient intake may contribute to successful conceptions by improving the quality of the sperm.

"This study is the first to suggest that paternal diet may play a role after conception in the development of healthy offspring."

Ms Suzanne Young, a researcher in Professor Eskenazi's group, and the study co-ordinator, said: "Increasing folate intake can be as simple as taking a vitamin supplement with at least 400 micrograms of folate or eating breakfast cereal fortified with 100 per cent of the recommended daily intake for folic acid.

"In addition, green leafy vegetables, such as spinach, can have up to 100 micrograms of folate per serving."