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," to be published by Scribner in June, 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 like Prozac -- Mr. Solomon and his problems make an incongruous pair.

As dapper as his drawing room, Mr. Solomon invited a reporter into his house recently. The house, a 28-foot-wide, five-story brownstone on a prime block off lower Fifth Avenue, where Mr. 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, Mr. Solomon's house, in the blue plaque on its facade, quotes the sonnet also inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Ironies are not lost on Mr. Solomon. He enjoys them, like good dinner party anecdotes.

Wearing a burnt-tangerine windowpane-checked linen and cashmere blazer, beige suede trousers, brown Gucci boots, a shirt unbuttoned low on the chest, a leather-thong necklace, and with a gold ring in the shape of an alligator coiling on his finger, Mr. Solomon, accidentally observed admiring his appearance in a pier mirror inside the front door, greeted his guest in the drawing room and led him upstairs to a rooftop garden for a talk, his golden retriever, River, at his side.

He passed several people as he ascended -- the citizenry of Mr. Solomon's world. (When asked, the close-friend count numbered 50.)

"That was Ethan Hawke's mother, by the way," he said, stepping onto his terrace. Leslie Hawke, in a Peace Corps project, is working with a group of Romanians who are studying the homeless here. The Romanians were staying in the house.

Recalling his depression in "The Noonday Demon," Mr. Solomon writes, "One day, seven years ago, hell came to pay me a surprise visit,'' a turn of events unleashed, he thinks, by his mother's death. Carolyn Solomon, whose ovarian cancer was diagnosed in 1989, planned her suicide in 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 H.I.V., as he writes, because he wished to die from terminal illness like his mother.

Mr. 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. Mr. 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 H.I.V. last month.

The author of "A Stone Boat," a novel, and "The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost" and a regular contributor to magazines like The New Yorker, where the article that became "The Noonday Demon" appeared, Mr. 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. Mr. Solomon sat by a bed of tulips under an evening sky as blue as his eyes. Wide and oceanic in expression, part of which is dilation from drugs, part of which is his absorption in things, Mr. Solomon's eyes are those of a man continuously looking out to sea.

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, Mr. Solomon during his sickness 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Solomon fed and bathed his son when Andrew became too disengaged to take care of himself.

"I'm very proud of my father," Mr. Solomon said, in a second interview. "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, Mr. 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."

Mr. 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," Mr. 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."

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

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

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

"Bigger than life, enthusiastic, imaginative, a lot of fun," he said, when asked how. "A little over the top, sometimes slightly ridiculous, a little bit affected but mostly in a forgivable way, occasionally self-important, and at the same time reasonably decorous."

"A mixture of rather wild and solid and bourgeois," he concluded. When met with agreement, he laughed. The elegant Mr. Solomon's laugh keeps him honest -- he brays loudly.

"There is a certain form of theatricality that the house's scale lent itself to," said Mr. Couturier, the architect, who has known Mr. Solomon for 13 years. "He's of a different era, because of his dandyism. He finds that quite amusing. But no one wanted to pretend to live here the way they lived in 1882."

There are 250 bronze door knobs by Allegra Hicks, an English designer, who is a friend of Mr. Couturier's and now Mr. Solomon's, that look like large serpent's eggs. The Chinese wedding bed in the master bedroom was designed by William Sofield, in a modernist mandarin manner, based on scrolled-cloud panels Mr. Solomon bought at a flea market in Beijing.

Elizabeth Zeschin, an American photographer based in London, who stays with Mr. Solomon in New York, said: "Andrew's feels like home to me. It just does, because it's him -- it's so Andrew. The contemporary art and the beautiful antiques are put together in a way I've never seen anywhere else, and I've photographed a lot of homes."

Mr. Solomon, whose last depression was in 1999, precipitated when a lover left unannounced for a monastery, is happy here, too. He receives friends, publicly, in the grand rooms downstairs. He retreats to privacy above. The house, behind its heavy black door at the street, could be moated, for all the intrusion it allows.

"I feel as though I close that door, and I'm safe and unassailable," he said, shaking his visitor's hand to depart for a dinner engagement, then walking out and leaving him behind in the house.

In his book, Mr. Solomon quotes Jay Gatsby -- an inevitable personal comparison, but like most inevitable comparisons, Mr. Solomon tends to get to them first.

"I tried very hard to die," Gatsby says, weary with wisdom, "but I seemed to bear an enchanted life."