Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring is about six authors whose lives meet at the juncture of creativity and alcoholism. While Laing (who walked along the river where Virginia Woolf killed herself for her previous book, To the River) acknowledges she had many alcoholic writers to choose from, the half dozen she selected justify and reward her nuanced attentions. Though F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams have been studied to the point of exhaustion, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and John Berryman have been less comprehensively examined.
Laing's exploration of these extraordinary men's lives has many facets. The Trip to Echo Spring, named for the bourbon favored by the maudlin Brick in Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is partly literary criticism--and no lightweight in that department, showing serious attention to her subjects' works. Meanwhile, the level of biographical detail reveals Laing's interest in their intersections with one another in life as well as literature. There are hints of travelogue as Laing crisscrosses North America to visit the crucial locations in these writers' lives, from Hemingway's Key West to Fitzgerald and Berryman's St. Paul, Minn., to Port Angeles, Wash., where Raymond Carver finished his life.
The common themes Laing finds in the cities and the bars where these men drank themselves into misery, death, and art include swimming, fluidity and the cleansing properties of sea and stream. She delves into the biology and psychology of of alcoholism, with several forays into Alcoholics Anonymous, and finally touches on her own upbringing as the child of alcoholics. While she focuses on the relationship between writing and drinking, another key part of her journey is personal--but her history with drunks is only gradually revealed and never takes center stage.
All the disparate elements come together elegantly in Laing's quietly contemplative prose. She is sensitive to the struggles of these tortured men (among them several suicides) and deeply appreciative of their accomplishments, but also clear-headed about their shortcomings and their abusive treatment of others as well as themselves. A lovely piece of writing in its own right, The Trip to Echo Spring is a fine tribute to artists as well as a lament for their addiction. --Julia Jenkins
Shelf Talker: Laing's poetic ruminations on the alcoholism of six authors will charm readers of travel writing, biography and literary criticism.