Ernest Hemingway with his wife Mary in Cuba. Photograph: Getty
Travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, science, psychoanalysis: Olivia Laing’s second book lines up genres like shot glasses along a bar. It could result in a terrible grape-and-grain headache, but her examine of six alcoholic American writers – John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway – is so very carefully measured it seldom loses clarity.
Laing dreamily follows her subjects’ wavering trails across the US – attending an AA meeting in New York, swimming in the “deep, mixed waters” off Essential West – whilst remaining steady, sympathetic and wary of the cliches of the tough-drinking genius. Impacted by her own family’s expertise with drink, she focuses on the sadness and worry, on ruptured beginnings and broken ends. She imagines Hemingway’s relief at clinking ice into a glass right after evoking his father’s suicide in For Whom the Bell Tolls (“a shot of the 1 issue no a single can consider from you”) and properties in on a desperate line from Berryman’s Dream Songs: “Wine, cigarettes, liquor, require require require.” Such horrible emptiness may possibly be the overriding theme, but the book is full of insight, compassion and unexpected elegance.
• To buy The Trip to Echo Spring for £8.79 with cost-free United kingdom p&p get in touch with Guardian guide support on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.united kingdom.
The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing evaluation a study of 6 alcoholic US writers
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