The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Writing

From a line in Tennessee Williams' play "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" comes a difficult and even shallow book by writer and critic Olivia Laing, "A Trip to Echo Spring". Taking the lives and work of some of the most important writers of our time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver, Laing tries to observe a link between their genius and alcohol. This, however, proves to be no easy feat.

Laing, in her second book, scrutinizes the link between the socially acceptable drug of choice- alcohol, and artistry in the written form. She dips into their lives, their memoirs and their most hidden moments to reveal - well sort of reveal - how these things are all linked and dance in a slight waltz together.

The book, a kind of travel meets literary blast and critique, has just not enough depth to carry it through this lambasted topic. She revels in her own opinions and veers off the mark too many times to actually bring the reader to a specific destination. That said, it's an interesting read, even though the two most significant writers (Hemingway and Fitzgerald) are given the least attention.

The writer, who comes from a family with drinking problems, has enough experience to write about the disease but somehow doesn't let herself loose in its grit. She's too busy getting a sandwich and walking to the bridge to eat it, to really understand these writers and their demise. Or maybe it taints her view of alcoholism completely and becomes so subjective that it reads like a literary moveable feast, and less like a critical analysis on the topic.

What we know about the disease of alcoholism is limited. Research and Bill W's AA has uncovered as much as it can, but the very core of its nature remains somewhat elusive. The subtitle of the book, "Why Writers Drink," is what the book sets out to explain, and with some more thought and analysis, it may have actually achieved that. Unfortunately you are left staring out to the vast sea, without a cocktail, or mocktail, in your hand.

After all, like Dorothy Parker said: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." So yes, maybe writers and creative types really have loved the bottle all along, but to what extent truly?

"A Trip to Echo Spring"
Olivia Laing
$18.50
Picador