In the following review, Iannone questions Styron's depiction of depression as a disease over which sufferers have little control.

When an individual suffers the honors of Auschwitz, survives to write inspiringly about man's ability to endure in extreme circumstances, but years later takes his own life over what many would deem no more than the ordinary unhappiness of the human condition, the event seems bound to become at the very least a source of sorrowful wonder. Such was the death of the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi in 1987, and such was the mixture of shock, dismay, disappointment, puzzlement, and confusion expressed by admiring writers and critics at a conference held some months after his suicide.

But the response of the American novelist William Styron was quite different. When he read a report in the New York Times on the Levi conference. Styron was offended to learn that...