The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing, review Debord stands outside Olivia Laing's terms of reference. For her, writers means a particular canon of American male writers. It also means writers whose lives follow an AA-approved narrative arc of abjection and renunciation. In the course of one of those epic American journeys many of us did on our gap year, Laing threads together a daisy chain of tangent lives, from the patrician New Englander John Cheever, to Hemingway and Tennessee Williams in Florida and New Orleans, to fast times at the Iowa Writers" Workshop, to a terminal point in Washington State, where Raymond Carver succumbed to lung cancer after 10 years on the wagon. There's an interesting chapter on the poet John Berryman, too, and some stuff on Fitzgerald; though in this Gatsbian year there might have been more - maybe Laing felt that, as far as drink went, being married to Zelda was justification enough. There's a bit of science, including a report that finds a strong causal link between childhood trauma and substance abuse. There's also some reportage. Laing goes to an AA meeting, a doleful scene indeed, smoke-lacquered and jargon-fugged; later, she joins a tour group going around Hemingway's house. There are passages of what might at a pinch be called literary criticism - in Laing's hands, a process in which this play or that short story is briskly winnowed until the part about drink - or the part that represents an act of denial about drink - can be held up in triumph. There are even fragments of what might have been a rather better book: a straightforward first-person memoir in which Laing talks about having an alcoholic stepmother. But it doesn't seem to occur to her that her personal experiences may have made her less, not more, able to write objectively about other people's drinking. As to whether writers drink in a way that bus conductors don't - or whether drunk writers do more damage than drunken lathe operators or cardiologists - you could consider the precariousness of the freelance life, of course, and a certain willingness to suspend disbelief about money - even if Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Williams all made a fair bit. Then there's a kind of narcosis to which the writer's rapid decompression out of intense solitude and into hilarious sociability can lead. Laing quotes Cheever: "The next engagement that threatened to arouse my shyness... I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat. The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I. Other pressures tend to be more individualised - half-repressed bisexuality in Cheever's case, fear of failure in Carver's and so on. Then there's something more interesting and more fugitive. Writers are pathologically afraid of being bored. It's quite telling that the heavy-drinking writer tends to make a big thing of being at his or her desk bright and early even after a boozy session the night before. This is partly machismo - or denial, to give it another name - but partly it's a kind of self-deceptive mechanism whereby you get 1,000 words done by lunchtime, then you're staring into your existential abyss all afternoon while everyone else is at work or looking after kids, and your chosen poison is winking at you, and the sun creeps ever closer to the yard-arm and, well, you get the idea. This mechanism is crucial to Cheever's work in particular. He doesn't write like a drunk - unlike Hemingway whose toughness-plus-sentimentality is like being hugged by a tattooed stranger at closing time. But Cheever does write with all the diseased acuity of the chronically hung-over. His work is suffused with shifts and switches in the late-afternoon light, blurred memories swivelling suddenly into focus. It's drunkenness recollected, not in tranquillity, but in the acid disquiet of the next day. And as Laing concedes - it's really good. Mannered maybe and of its time certainly, but approaching a perfect, Chekhovian harmony of form and substance. Cheever dried out in 1975, six years before his death; he didn't write much during his last years. Carver thought sobriety improved him, though the heavy hand of his editor, Gordon Lish, makes any change in his style hard to discern. And of course, in the end hard-drinking Hemingway, like Debord, turned a gun on himself. The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink by Olivia Laing 284pp, Canongate, Telegraph offer price: £18 (plus £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20, ebook £7.72)