DISCOVERIES

Betrayed

A Play

George Packer

Faber & Faber: 128 pp., $13 paper

IN January 2007, George Packer went to Iraq to write for the New Yorker about Iraqis risking their lives to work with the Americans there.

“Their American employers in general regarded their welfare as a bureaucratic nuisance,” he writes in the introduction to “Betrayed,” a play based on the resulting article. These Iraqis, who were treated by their countrymen as collaborators, were “as hunted and helpless as European Jews in the early 1940s.” Conversations with them, he writes, “made my eyes burn with shame.”

In their voices, Packer heard not only bitterness but also “the lingering surprise and hurt of a jilted lover” -- though some readers will feel that the threat to their lives is much more affecting than any disillusionment with the United States.

Pippin Parker, a director with New York’s Culture Project, suggested that Packer write the stage adaptation; the play opened this month in the Project’s Soho theater. Adnan, a Sunni, and Laith, a Kurdish Shia, are friends who work in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Both confide in a low-level bureaucrat named Prescott, who is well-meaning but gullible when it comes to U.S. propaganda. Adnan and Laith talk about the vocabulary that has arisen since the Iraq war began -- new terms to describe informers, the contested use of the word “invasion,” what it means to be a “non-belonger” and the renaming of Baghdad landmarks by American soldiers (“Assassins’ Gate,” “Green Zone”).

When a female colleague is killed for working with the Americans, Prescott finally begins to lose faith. He suggests that the ambassador arrange visas for Iraqis endangered because they’ve worked for the embassy and is told it cannot be done, because the U.S. has not yet won the war. “What would winning mean?” Prescott asks but gets no answer.

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Against Happiness

In Praise of Melancholy

Eric G. Wilson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 176 pp., $20

ERIC G. WILSON likens the loss of melancholy in American life to species eradication, environmental degradation and other forms of self-destruction. He worries about the American obsession with happiness, especially the kind scripted by others. He wonders “if the wide array of antidepressants will one day make sweet sorrow a thing of the past,” if “we will become a society of Stepford wives and husbands,” with smiles “painted to all our faces as we walk blithely down the aisles of Wal-Mart.”

Wilson does not “want to romanticize clinical depression,” which he distinguishes from melancholy. Depression causes apathy in the face of unease; melancholy generates “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.” In other words, melancholy is critical to our individuality, as well as to our ability to experience beauty (not the Hallmark variety).

Wilson traces the connection between happiness and property back to British philosopher John Locke’s claim that everyone has a right to “life, liberty and property” (changed to “the pursuit of happiness,” in our Declaration of Independence) and Benjamin Franklin’s writings on time management and financial security. Herman Melville, with his Gothic genius, is our hero of melancholy, predecessor to such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Lowell, Jim Carrey, Sylvia Plath, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen. Without suffering and an intimate knowledge of death (here Wilson leans heavily on Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy”), we can never be whole and “full-hearted.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com