In “The Sutton Place Story,” John Cheever describes Deborah, “not quite 3 years old,” who, because of her home environment, “had naturally come to assume that cocktails were the axis of the adult world. She made Martinis in the sand pile and thought all the illustrations of cups, goblets, and glasses in her nursery books were filled with old-fashioneds.” Cheever and five other writers who had alcohol much on their minds (and in their livers) are brought together in Olivia Laing’s “The Trip to Echo Spring,” a combination of literary analysis, memoir and travelogue that is most beguiling and incisive when rambling through the work and lives of Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and John Berryman.

Ms. Laing starts with Cheever and Carver at a liquor store before 9 a.m. on a frozen day in Iowa City, where they were teaching, in 1973. Cheever, 61 at the time, is “wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt.” Soon we’re effortlessly moved to an evaluation of Cheever’s potent, discombobulating story “The Swimmer,” in which, as Ms. Laing puts it, “time is slopping around like gin in a glass.”

It does some slopping, too, in this book, which moves between the lives of its subjects in a frequent but not jarring way. (The book’s title refers to a line in Williams’s play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” when a character calls a visit to the liquor cabinet “a little short trip to Echo Spring,” Echo Spring being a brand of bourbon.)

“I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them,” Ms. Laing writes early on. “More specifically I wanted to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.” Those are complex, even impossible questions, and it’s a credit to Ms. Laing’s book that it succeeds despite inevitably finding more mystery and contradiction than answers.