PHILOSOPHY: MARY MORRISSYreviews The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern WorldBy David Malouf Chatto & Windus, 106pp. £10

BLAME JEFFERSON. Thomas Jefferson, that is, who on a hot summer’s day in June 1776, penned the Declaration of American Independence and elevated happiness to an unalienable right along with life and liberty. Or rather, the “pursuit of happiness” – not quite the same thing: but the end result, whether Jefferson intended it or not, is a notion that has persisted tenaciously in western industrialised society. That ordinary everyday happiness is somehow guaranteed to all of us, and we feel cheated if we don’t get it.

So says David Malouf, Australian poet and novelist, in this slim volume that takes on such a large subject. The book itself is the size of a missal, and looks like one of those 18th-century pocket books favoured by ladies. It makes perfect reading around this time of the year, a season so unrelentingly bent on happiness that the word invades every greeting. (One of the curiosities of the etymology of the word “happiness” is that it shares its root with words such as happenstance, happening and hapless – and originally meant, not the joy and contentment we define it as, but a state of being lucky and favoured by the gods.)

The Happy Lifeis neither self-help manual nor how-to guide; rather it's that old-fashioned beast, a philosophical meditation. In a mere 100 pages, Malouf ranges freely on the nature of happiness, drawing on the work of Plato, Ovid, Montaigne, Pascal, Rubens, Rembrandt and Shakespeare, among a host of others.

If that sounds high-faluting, fear not. Malouf is no fusty academic. As a writer, his relationship with history, art and philosophy is one of intellectual curiosity. He is an imaginative traveller who sees the continuity, not the ruptures, between our world and the past. (An early novella of his, An Imaginary Life, transplanted the exile of the Greek poet, Ovid, from the Black Sea to the outback landscape of Australia; his last novel, Ransom, retells an episode from the Iliad.)

What makes this book both invigorating and accessible is Malouf's luminous and, more importantly, lucid prose, and his delight in the lovely doubleness of language. Here he is writing about Rubens's Het Pelsken, a nude painting of the artist's young wife: "Painting is a physical act in which the painter's energy is dynamically of the moment, in the quickness of the eye, the sureness of his hand, as brushstrokes and paint reproduce what he feels in the moment itself. That energy is a form of joy. What he is setting down, direct onto the canvas, is his happiness, and this perhaps, is as close as we will ever get to it, to another's man's being; the closest we will get – and we take the phrase in both senses – to happiness in the flesh."

Getting back to Jefferson, Malouf contends that the happiness guarantee is very much a New World concept. A decade after the American Declaration of Independence, the French revolutionaries put forward their stalwart triplets – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – but happiness didn’t get a star turn in their pantheon. Inserting the pursuit of happiness into the declaration, Malouf believes, was a language act, rather than a considered political one. “He [Jefferson] was led in the act of writing itself, to speak more radically than he knew.”

So why aren’t we happier in the 21st century? (Those of us, that is, who have the luxury of considering our own happiness.) Even in the midst of a world-wide economic crisis, we don’t have to contend with the plagues and famines, terrors, tortures and wars of our medieval forefathers. Malouf contends that it has to do with our view of ourselves and our view of the planet.

In the early 1970s a point was reached far out in space from which the earth could be filmed and beamed back at us. This, Malouf suggests, made us feel small but it also gave us a vision that saw things in global terms. It gave birth to a new sensibility – a global one.

Not surprisingly, Malouf argues that the global economy has much to do with our 21st- century unease. The bankers and brokers are like the gods of old but, unlike them, “the Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods”.

The other difficulty in working out how happy we are is in measuring it, another 21st-century mania. Happiness is stubbornly singular. “It belongs to the world of what is felt, what cannot be presented or numbered on a scale because it cannot be seen.”

It is similarly reductive to single out just a few of the strands in Malouf’s wonderfully digressive book. The brain-versus-mind debate, the cult of body image, the joys of writing by hand all get an airing in this miscellany.

Even Ireland “being descended upon like Jove’s eagle” by the IMF gets a mention. In fact, it seems vulgar to splurge 800 words on so elegant and concise a volume, except to urge readers to experience for themselves the singular happiness of Malouf’s lyrical pursuit of Jefferson’s fugitive notion.

Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic. She is currently writer-in-residence at UCD