The Widows of Eastwick [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2008

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées—Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie—have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer? The old Rhode Island seaside town, where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne, is still magical for them. Now Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish them ill. How they cope with the lingering traces of their evil deeds, the shocks of a mysterious counterspell, and the advancing inroads of old age, form the burden on Updike’s delightful, ominous sequel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Motivated by advancing age, loneliness, latent guilt and a sense of unfinished business, the erstwhile Witches of Eastwick return to their former Rhode Island coastal town in this tepid sequel to the 1984 novel. Alexandra, the fleshy Earth Mother; Jane, the wasp-tongued snob; and Sukie, a would-be a sexpot operating beyond her expiration date, have each survived the second marriages that took place following their flight from Eastwick in the early '70s, after a rival, Jenny Gabriel, died as a result of their spell. Where before they were strong, sassy, lusty and empowered, now in late middle-age they are vulnerable, fearful and in thrall to their aging bodies. Witchcraft is now beyond them; when they try to resurrect their supernatural powers to atone for their guilt, an inadvertent death ensues. While Updike remains amazingly capable of capturing women's thoughts about their bodies and their sex lives, the plot never gains momentum; the first hundred pages, in fact, are tedious travelogues covering the widows' travels to Egypt and China. Updike's observations about culture and social disharmony flash with their customary brilliance—a less than sparkling Updike novel is still an Updike novel. (Oct.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

If it weren't for the popular film version (1987), it's not certain that The Witches of Eastwick—playful rather than powerful like the Rabbit novels and accused by some of misogynist leanings—would have remained as popular as it did. Yet, despite lukewarm reviews, those who enjoyed that first novel may find something to like in this sequel. Widows resurrects the fun of the original, and Updike is, as usual, a master stylist with sharp, sensual writing. Some critics, however, were thrown off by the contrived premise, the initial aimless travelogue, and the sappy subplots. A few even suggested that Updike doesn't adequately understand women's aging, though the New York Times argued that the witches are most compellingly understood as ordinary women. In sum, Widows is a mixed bag, best enjoyed by readers curious to see where Updike's brand of feminism has landed him 25 years later.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307269604
• ISBN-13: 978-0307269607
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #760,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", October 23, 2008

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Widows of Eastwick (Hardcover)

(3.5 stars) Thirty years after Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie worked their black magic on their enemies in Eastwick, Rhode Island, earning the enmity of many of its citizens, they decide to return to Eastwick for a summer vacation. The three women have all been widowed, and they have not had much contact during the thirty year interim. Reconnecting initially through letters and phone calls, the women have traveled to international destinations during the previous two summers--first, a trip by Alexandra and Jane to Egypt, and the following year, a trip by all three to China. Though all of them have changed, they look forward to their return to Eastwick, partly out of curiosity and partly out of guilt for the death of Jenny Gabriel, the young bride of Darryl Van Horne, who had had affairs with all three "witches."

Their return to Eastwick is shocking to its inhabitants. Taking the only summer rental they can find--at the former Van Horne mansion, now condos--they discover that the town has changed, not surprisingly, and many of the people they knew there are now dead. "Eastwick's lost its messy charm," Jane notes. "There's something unfriendly out there," she believes. When they discover that Christopher Gabriel is in town, they know that this "disciple" of Darryl Van Horne, who is also the brother of Jenny Gabriel, will bring about a showdown that may cost them their lives.

Updike's prose often sparkles, filled with the figurative language he has made a trademark, and his tone keeps the reader amused and interested. The dialogue is often wooden, however, as he sometimes uses it to provide essential background information while attempting to advance the action. The first one hundred pages are devoted to the women's trips to Egypt and China, where they (and the reader) get lectured about other belief systems concerning man's relationship to the world of death, suggesting similarities between these civilizations from the ancient past and the women's own witchcraft.

The "witches" do not arrive in Eastwick until more than one-third of the book has passed, and though they try to correct past wrongs by doing present good deeds, they must also "watch their backs." The intensity of their malevolence, an involving feature of 1984's The Witches of Eastwick, disappears here, and with it much of the fun of reading. Here they are the possible victims of another's revenge--relatively passive characters who spend more time remembering their past lives than in making the most of their present lives. Those who enjoyed Witches, with its imaginative and unapologetically vengeful characters, may be disappointed by the characters' desire to make amends here, and the author's focus, late in the book, on possible scientific explanations for some of the witches' powers makes the novel less fantastic and, frankly, more pedestrian. n Mary Whipple

The Witches of Eastwick
Pigeon Feathers, my all-time favorite Updike creation,one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom : The Four Novels : Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest (Everyman's Library)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hex and Sex, January 18, 2009

By 

John Murphy "O, for a Muse of Fire" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Widows of Eastwick (Hardcover)

"Years ago we grabbed what we wanted from the town and then left. Now we've returned to give something back." So avows Alexandra, one of the three Witches of Eastwick who have transformed, through no unnatural spell, into three aging Widows of Eastwick, the title characters of John Updike's latest charm. The Widows were once-upon-a-time (in the early 70s) thirty-something divorcees dabbling in the dark arts, tasting the Devil's fruit in their sleepy Rhode Island hamlet. Time has since worked its strange alchemy. Now they are a coven of crones, recently widowed, revisiting the scene of their worst crime in Eastwick, where they put a hex on a younger, more innocent romantic rival that resulted in the woman's death.

This promising concept misfires in the execution. The first third of the book is a beautifully written travelogue. (If that's a compliment, it's a backhanded one.) Alexandra, the coven's matron, takes a scenic tour of Canada. Then she and Jane, the hissing cynic, together visit Egypt. Soon, with Sukie, the youngest and prettiest of the trio (even as she approaches seventy), the coven is fully reconvened...and they take a trip to China. Though Updike has never been known for his plots, Widows' is non-existent. It's as if he had taken notes during his own travels -- in majestic prose, full of keen observations, shimmering with surface detail -- but couldn't figure out a way to seamlessly incorporate them into his narrative. Readers unwilling to savor words for their own supple sake can blamelessly skim to page 120 or so.

That's when the three women finally arrive in Eastwick, only to find the site of their former transgressions a quaint, would-be tourist town. "People go around mourning the death of God," says Jane, in her snake-like hiss, "It's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without sin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep." Well, whatever the case, without sssin, people would certainly not appear in Updike's novels. Many of them, from 1968's 'Couples' up through 2004's 'Villages', have been a catalogue of grave sins committed by upper middle class East-coast suburbanites. As John Gardner has noted, "Updike's message, again and again, is a twisted version of the message of his church, neo-orthodox Presbyterianism: Christ has saved us, nothing is wrong; so come to bed with me."

Sentence-for-sentence Updike remains an endlessly inventive, spellbinding writer, but his worldview seems to have narrowed. I can't remember the last likable protagonist, male or female, in an Updike novel. Probably Ahmad, the eighteen-year old aspiring suicide bomber in 'Terrorist'. That tells you something. Alexandra, the witch turned widow, imagines what lies ahead for a group of teenagers, and offers us Updike's reductive view-of-the-world: "Sex, entrapment, weariness, death."

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eastwick Redux, November 7, 2008

By 

sl "AvidReader007" (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Widows of Eastwick (Hardcover)

I missed the witches and am grateful for Mr. Updike's return to Eastwick. Life has mellowed our Sukie, Alex and Jane, but this is true of all of us. Having lost their husbands, the three witches travel the world and end up, in all places, back in Eastwick. The town has changed, but there is enough of the old magic left to get this trio into trouble. Many reviews I have read take issue with the first chapter, which is devoted to the three witches traveling the globe and reconnecting. Updike is NOT for lazy readers. Updike takes us to ancient places where man tries to make sense of death through magic and nature. Updike's writing has lost none of its precession. He has cracked the code of human behavior and translates it to the page better than most.