Travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, science, psychoanalysis: Olivia Laing's second book lines up genres like shot glasses along a bar. It could cause a terrible grape-and-grain headache, but her study of six alcoholic American writers – John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway – is so carefully measured it rarely 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 Key West – while remaining steady, sympathetic and wary of the cliches of the hard-drinking genius. Affected by her own family's experience with drink, she focuses on the sadness and fear, on ruptured beginnings and broken ends. She imagines Hemingway's relief at clinking ice into a glass after evoking his father's suicide in For Whom the Bell Tolls ("a shot of the one thing no one can take from you") and homes in on a desperate line from Berryman's Dream Songs: "Wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need." Such terrible emptiness might be the overriding theme, but the book is full of insight, compassion and unexpected beauty.

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