A Chance Meeting: intertwined lives of American writers and artists (1854-1967) Rachel Cohen Jonathan Cape, 363pp, £18.99 ISBN 0224072587

The idea behind A Chance Meeting is splendid: to recreate, through snapshot vignettes, relationships between American writers and artists over more than a century. Books with premises at once so broad and so handily encapsulated can be risky, but Rachel Cohen's is both lively and authoritative. She brings an almost novelistic eye for detail to the sea of information, writing in her introduction: "I read until these figures seemed to me to stand and walk around of their own accord, to have the kind of coherence I would hope to know in my friends."

Cohen attempts to explain the parameters of her project, why she chose to include Willa Cather but not Flannery O'Connor, Joseph Cornell but not Mark Rothko: "Finally, and fundamentally, I wrote about people whose company I felt I had an ins-tinct for." The resulting book is a cautious but unabashedly subjective imaginative recreation of literary and artistic figures.

Cohen needs no apology for her idiosyncratic choices: in what dispassionate universe could Carl Van Vechten merit inclusion when William Faulkner does not? And yet, in the context of this assembly, Van Vechten emerges as an artistic facilitator, a gadabout whose greatest gifts lay in his ability to befriend, promote and unite others. By the same token, Cohen's choice of four photographers - Mathew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Richard Avedon - is at once expedient and personal: she is as interested in the history of artistic documentation as she is in the artists themselves.

Inevitably, given that there are 36 short pieces about almost as many individuals, the book runs the risk of monotony, of a cumulative sameness. (Ideally, it should be dipped into and enjoyed intermittently.) Perhaps conscious of this danger, Phyllis Rose, when writing the marvellous Parallel Lives, a sort of antecedent to A Chance Meeting, confined herself to five Victorian-era relationships, each explored in some depth. Although her book undoubtedly suffers for the brevity and number of its chapters, Cohen offers a broad cultural biography, peppered with surprising anecdotes: Thackeray's comments, when visiting the James family, on young Henry's buttons; the knowledge that William James and his student W E B Du Bois travelled together to visit Helen Keller at the Perkins Institute for the Blind; that James Baldwin and Richard Avedon attended the same high school, and worked together on its magazine; and the glorious vision of Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali composing a sonnet over lunch.

These glancing insights will doubtless spur readers to further inquiry. Cohen touches several times upon the importance of Stieglitz's support of other artists, and the influence of his gallery, 291. She provides a sufficient glimpse of the oft-overlooked Leo Stein, brother of the flamboyant Gertrude. She allows us to see unlikely souls in their rare coupling - for example, the meeting of Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin - as well as luminous moments from long-standing relationships. She is careful to show the overlap of generations, the passing of the artistic flame: a 26-year-old Willa Cather attends Mark Twain's 70th birthday party; Marcel Duchamp displays his celebrated urinal at Stieglitz's gallery in 1917, and resurfaces to play chess with John Cage in 1965-66; and the four photographers, whose portraits run throughout the book, capture faces young and old over their lifetimes.

Ironically, the reach of Cohen's sympathies is the book's biggest flaw. She inhabits the artists' lives and minds and, in doing so, rarely allows room for anger, unpleasantness or spite. The argument that destroyed the friendship of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston is so neutrally described that it is hard to grasp what they were so steamed up about. The irreversible separation of Leo and Gertrude Stein after so many closely shared years remains mysterious. Individuals, obviously prickly and peculiar, collide with apparently unflagging bonhomie. Only Katherine Anne Porter is sufficiently horrid to emerge as a villain, cattily writing of Willa Cather that "No genius ever looked less like one" - and again, "Miss Cather looks awfully like somebody's big sister, or maiden aunt, both of which she was." Thank goodness, amid all this goodwill, for her sharp tongue.

Cohen has written about these men and women with passion, imagination and, crucially, with humility. The title is taken from an essay by Cather (herself far from vain), about her encoun- ter with Gustave Flaubert's niece at a hotel in Provence: "I took one of her lovely hands and kissed it, in homage to a great period." Explaining her attachment to the figures she has chosen, Cohen writes, "I often thought about the way Hart Crane had addressed Walt Whitman in 'The Bridge': 'Not greatest, thou, - not first, nor last, - but near.'" A fine lens through which to see these artists and, indeed, this book.

Claire Messud's most recent book is The Hunters: two novellas (Picador)

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