By William L. Hamilton

NEW YORK -- The son of a pharmaceutical fortune, Andrew Solomon, a writer, is living proof that money can't buy happiness. His latest book, "The Noonday Demon," just released by Scribner ($28), is as its subtitle states, "An Atlas of Depression," including three life- strangling episodes of his own.

For a person who is, for now, the only serious historian of a sickness that disables more people in the United States than any other -- 28 million Americans are taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac -- Solomon and his problems make an incongruous pair.

As dapper as his drawing room, Solomon invited a reporter into his house recently. The house, a 28-foot-wide, five-story-tall brownstone on a prime block off lower Fifth Avenue, where Solomon, 37, lives alone with his staff of two, was rebuilt and refurbished five years ago by Robert Couturier, a French architect, in a large-scale style that could be called "Student Prince."

With its silk brocaded sofas, doges' lanterns, Russian paintings, polar bear rugs and Chinese dragon robes, the house is a principality that exists in storybooks only -- part Eastern Europe, part Lubitsch's Hollywood. A historical landmark because Emma Lazarus, the poet, lived there, the blue plaque on the facade of Solomon's home quotes the sonnet inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Ironies are not lost on him. Solomon enjoys them, like good dinner party anecdotes.

Mother's death

In recalling his depression, Solomon writes in "The Noonday Demon": "One day, seven years ago, hell came to pay me a surprise visit," a turn of events triggered, he thinks, by his mother's death. Carolyn Solomon, in whom ovarian cancer was diagnosed in 1989, planned her suicide during the terminal stage of her illness with her two sons, David and Andrew, and her husband, their father Howard. That morning, she made the tea and muffins to keep the pills down: 40 Seconals. Forty-five minutes later she was dead. The last thing she told Andrew, as he cried at her bed, was, "Enjoy what you have." Clearing out her effects, he pocketed the Seconal she hadn't swallowed. He was 27.

Three years later he was trying to kill himself, not with pills but with "economical" trips to a park in London for sex that he hoped would infect him with HIV, as he writes, to die from terminal illness like his mother.

Solomon is well now, though he argues in his expansively researched book, which uses his own experience as a point of departure for a much wider discussion of the subject, that depression recurs. It is inexorable, like life when you choose it, he believes. Solomon takes five medications daily: Effexor, Wellbutrin, Zyprexa, Topramax and BuSpar. He speaks regularly with both a psychiatrist and a psychopharmacologist. He tested negatively, again, for HIV last month.

The author of "A Stone Boat," a novel, "The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost" and a regular contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker, where the article that became "The Noonday Demon" appeared, Solomon has called depression his "big career break." He received a $1 million advance for the book.

"I certainly think it's possible that I'll change my mind at some stage, and kill myself; I refuse to make any promises on that score to anyone," he said. Solomon sat by a bed of tulips under an evening sky as blue as his eyes. Wide oceans of expression, part of which is dilation from drugs, part of which is his obvious absorption in things, it is as though Solomon is looking out to sea continuously.

Father's connection

Depression produces emotional requirements of a home that happiness and health don't. In extremes, home is like the skin -- either the edge of safety or the thing you claw out of, unable to inhabit the identity it represents.

Sensitive to settings as much as situations, during his sicknesses Solomon alternatively hid in his own house, retreating to his bed, or escaped to his father's apartment, too weak to wash.

Howard Solomon, chairman of Forest Laboratories in New York, a pharmaceutical company valued at $12 billion, introduced antidepressants like Celexa, which now competes in sales with Prozac, because of a sudden urgency to help people like his son.

"He became interested in antidepressants, in part, because he had seen how effective they were for me," said Solomon, who dedicates his book to his father, "who gave me life not once, but twice." He credits his illness with having brought them close. The elder Solomon fed and bathed his son when Andrew became too disengaged to take care of himself.

"I'm very proud of my father," Solomon said. "He's an entirely self-made man. He grew up waiting on milk lines in the Bronx. His great love was always music, and he got a job when he was 13 selling librettos at the old Met because he loved opera. Now he's chairman of the City Ballet and on the board of the opera."

When depression gripped him in 1994 -- in his book, Solomon describes it as a tree being choked by a vine -- he was living in a loft on West 15th Street, designed as an elaborate disguise against the reality of being a boy who was losing his mother.

"I was coming back to New York from London because my mother was dying, and I had a nervous breakdown there," he said, chin tilted, hand to his throat. "It was a place that looked rather glossy on the surface -- it was quite chic looking, barren and austere -- and nothing in it worked, including me. When I got it I wanted to be really tough, and live downtown. I got some sadistic-looking metal furniture in Berlin and that was all the furniture that I had. And I bought a leather jacket. I didn't get any tattoos because I thought they'd age badly. But, I was in the mood."

Reducing obligations

Solomon's second psychological storm hit during the move into the house where he lives now.

The imposing house, bought in what he described as "a weird estate sale," was a ruin -- not the best roof to put over your head when you're depressive.

"It was falling down," Solomon said. "I didn't want to be here. Everything I owned was in boxes. Everything was filthy. There were construction people everywhere. I had a hateful housekeeper who was trying to make me miserable, who actually subsequently wrote me a letter and said that she'd been having a nervous breakdown at the time."

Solomon rode it out -- adjusting his medications, staying again with his father, stripping his obligations to a skeletal list and disappearing.

"You'd leave messages," said Amy Fine Collins, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, and a friend of 11 years. "It was like he'd gone out of town."

Five years later, the new house was home -- a fairly perfect reflection, Solomon found, of himself.

"A mixture of rather wild and solid and bourgeois," he concluded. When agreed with, he laughed. The elegant Solomon's laugh keeps him honest.