Customer Reviews

The Widows of Eastwick. John Updike

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

(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)

"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."

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.

It's been 30 years since the comely coven of Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie left Eastwick behind for separate lives with newly conjured husbands, Alexandra to an artist in New Mexico; Jane to a well-to-do financial consultant in New England; and Sukie to a nouveau-riche entrepreneur in Connecticut. Who's to say if they left Eastwick for a second chance at love and happiness or was it to escape the shame and guilt of having killed one of their own? Perhaps they left to avoid the ire of their numerous enemies, who coveted their beauty, power, and sexual freedom?

Suffice it to say, gone are the days of meeting together to raise the cone of power. No more maleficia. No more orgiastic sabbats with their shared lover Daryl Van Horne. No more feasting upon fine delicacies in the grand rooms of Lenox Manor. Alexandra fills her days devoted to her husband and his craft, somehow finding the time to nurture her own. Whereas Jane somewhat enjoys the leisurely pace of the idle rich, and Sukie expresses her creativity by writing romance novels just this side of pornography.

Having settled into the routine of their lives, the women suddenly find themselves widowed with the death of their respective husbands. The witches now face the grim reality of their own death and seek to renew the friendships of the past. After having had little contact in the past thirty years, the women initially reconnect through letters and phone calls. These calls first lead to Alexandra and Jane taking a trip to Egypt together, and the following year, Sukie joins them for a trip to China.

After having to persuade Alexandra a bit, the women decide to return to the "scene of their primes" as one of the witches describes Eastwick. Interestingly, they end up renting Lenox Manor (now divided into several condos and renamed to reflect the fact) for the months of August and September. Though many years have passed, they begrudgingly look forward to their return trip to Eastwick, which they attribute to both a sense of curiosity as well as a sense of guilt for their part in the demise of Jenny Gabriel, the wife of Daryl Van Horne.

The return of the witches to Eastwick shocks its citizens, and Jane in particular gets a peculiar shock in return, or rather a series of shocks. Alexandra un-expectantly meets the wife of one of her past lovers who attributes her daughter's inability to conceive to the coven's black magic. Sukie meets with a former lover, eleven years her junior, only to find that fantasy has given away to reality and her former boy-toy is now an old man. Not only has his six-pack grown into a keg, but his hand has become deformed due to an accident which occurred aboard the ship on which he used to work.

About the same time Jane suffers a health scare, she realizes that Christopher Gabriel, the brother of the girl they murdered, is also in town. The women come to believe that Darryl has shared some of his power with the man they describe as his `disciple' and that he is the cause of Jane's problems. The witches decide to flex their magical muscles once again and raise the cone of power. However, this time they decide to attempt to right the wrongs of the past. Jane seeks a healing, while Alexandra prays to the Goddess to allow her old enemy's daughter to conceive, and Sukie makes her wish for her former lover to be made whole again.

They barely raised the cone of power before the unthinkable happens. Their enemy claims his first victim from among their number and the two witches left behind must counteract his spell or be taken next.

It would be a mistake to say that I read this book, but rather I devoured it; as once I started reading it, I could not put Widows down until I had digested the whole story. I very much enjoyed the author's descriptions of the many places the witches visited during their travels as well as their philosophical banter which was quite interesting. I found the women's attempts to understand and actually utilize today's technology (cell phones, hybrid cars, etc...) both amusing and realistic.

I especially liked the description of the witches' ritual to raise the cone of power and was delighted that the author actually attempted to somewhat update their practices. The fact that the witches used terms such as chakras, athame, and Wicca hinted that at least one of them had continued her studies on some level. I would have loved to have gotten the elderly witches observations on how the craft has come to the forefront of society's consciousness. How the practice of magic and witchcraft isn't as hidden as it was in their day. What might these witches have thought of Buffy or The Charmed Ones?

There were a few instances where I was slightly offended such as Alexandra's reaction when it dawned upon her that one of the men in her tour group was gay; or not so much disgusted but disturbed as when Sukie (a sixty-something year old woman, mind you) got a facial after orally pleasuring one of her lovers. However, I chalked up Alexandra's reaction to her personal prejudice due to her age as well as having been betrayed by Daryl, who had left the women so long ago for the bed of another man.

Finally, I found the author's attempt to explain magic in scientific terms somewhat boring as well as Chris explanation as to how he attempted to duplicate the witch's maleficia by manipulating electrons too clinical albeit not impossible. I felt that any attempt to dissect the process of magic detracts from the mystery of the power and removes any sense of the enjoyment of reading.

I found Widows to be a fast, interesting, and delightful read, save for a few inconsistencies and aforementioned detractions. The author did an excellent job of maintaining the characterizations he created with the first novel, with just enough changed to show that the women had matured, or rather had grown. I had hoped for an appearance of Daryl Van Horne, but perhaps his time has passed. At the young age of seventy-something, lets hope that this chapter in the witches lives isn't their epilogue and that they have just enough life in them for one more story--if only we didn't have to wait another 28 years.

I've come to expect a lot of John Updike; I was disappointed with The Widows of Eastwick. The plot was reasonable enough but I found the reading heavy-going at times -- various trips the widows took sounded like a travelogue instead of relevant plot material. It gave me the impression that John Updike deducted these travels as business expenses and felt obliged to bore us with minutae in order to justify the write-off. John has excelled over the decades with his writing -- but this book isn't a stellar example of that. Perhaps the popularity of The Witches of Eastwick forced him into recounting a sequel that isn't up to snuff.

E. Kaplan

Updike's original Witches of Eastwick, over 20 years ago, stands as one of his best books. While a first rate realist in his famous Rabbit books and Maples stories, Updike is often strongest in his forays into the semi-mythic and surreal, as evidenced by his early Centaur. The original Witches was a scathing social satire and a frank moral tale, the notoriously unfaithful movie version notwithstanding. The three middle aged witches started out all fun, and then the story moved into true horror and darkness. In one of the best sustained pieces of prose in Updike's career, they drove a man to murder his wife and his own suicide. As the book wound horribly down from that peak, they contrived to kill the couple's young daughter, a rival in love to their warlock master.

Shrewdly, this book is more subtle and nuanced, like a series of Bella Bartok variations as compared to Lizst's Dante symphony. The writing is brilliant as the witches, now elderly, reunite for travels. As usual, the seemingly desert stretches of Updike are crammed with first rate social observation and dry wit. Finally, the old witches cannot resist returning to the scene of their crimes, Eastwick. Updike sustains the lightness even further, which one finally realizes is a tense, ominous deadness. Finally, in a worthy pendant to the brilliant murder scene of the first book, the three recreate their cone of power to unexpected and dire results (I will follow the Amazon rules here & refrain from plot giveaway--especially necessary in a book this subtle and fine-tuned).

Briefly, though, it can be told that what emerges here is a direct play-out of the action of the earlier book. Further, the real scary point being driven home for the witches here is that not only have their own powers waned, but many others in their locale are also dabbling in the black arts, some with malicious aims toward them. The greater point, in this updated social satire, is how witchery and the occult have seamed themselves broadly into the fabric of everyday, mundane American life.

Simply, by toning down the high drama of the first book, Updike achieves a spooky new peak here, in his experiments in magical realism. He makes it virtually convincing on a level of straight realism. A cool, Calvinist chorus voice, speaking for the people of Eastwick, occasionally comments on the action; it is another character in the drama. It never wholly becomes Updike's own narrative voice, but is given fair airplay, so to speak.

At the end, you simply have both narrative voices, and are left with a subtle choice how to view the action -- one or the other -- or perhaps both, simultaneously. Updike as fiction narrator may not display the certainty of his Calvinist chorus voice about the supernatural manifesting in the natural world. But he does clearly believe in moral choices, at least with the same conviction of the classic Greeks, and with a certain acknowledged Christian pedigree. Ultimately, he has come to the same conclusion as three other great American writers -- Melville, Robert Penn Warren, and Scott Fitzgerald -- that our North American civilization may be very broad, and greatly exciting too, but remains a very thin veneer over an absolute, primeval savagery.

Those are four Updike stars. Five Updike stars are reserved for books as good as all four in the Rabbit series. This is still delicious reading--and a chance to reflect, Updike style. There are other reviews that complain about the travelogue stuff at the beginning of "Widows of Eastwick" and I say, go for the ride. Watch these women re-connect with each other, listen to their inner thoughts about growing old ("thirty years had gone by like a game of pretend...") or remembering old lovers as they tour Beijing, Banff and The Pyramids. Taut fiction structure? Perhaps not. Enjoyable Updike prose? Yes.

"Sukie had imagined before turning old that quirky bad traits and mannerisms would fall away once the need to make a sexual impression was removed. Without the distraction of sex, a realer more honest self would be revealed. But it is sex, it turns out, that engages us in society and keeps us on our toes and persuades us to retract our rough edges, so we can mix in."

This sequel is about homogenization, about turning soft, about the riff-raff of America and the transformation of its towns (the barber shop to Ben & Jerry's). It's about wiccans, materialism, melancholy, quantum theory, and "how lightly civilization rests on the continents." It's about charkas, and being cleansed. It's about ceremonies (it's terrific to compare the living room "cone" scene with the big church scene), the astral plane and manufactured holidays. It's about the "power of the cone" and might not make too much sense unless you've read the first.

I really can't imagine reading this without reading the first book and knowing the references, particularly to Van Horne. It's a bit cartoonish at times, but I think it's fun to watch Updike work in a playground with fewer rules and to pour attitudes and ideas through the minds of three very different yet connected women.

Throughout, there are many rich Updike observations and great heapings of creamy Updike prose.

"She had watched the process of oxidization so intently that her brow and throat and collar area had sympathetically broken into a sweat. The circle she had drawn had become the base of a cone of power like a bison-skin teepee overheated by a cooking fire of mesquite twigs at its center."

It's sometimes a bit much, just over the top. But it fits with the mystical, ethereal moments that pop up in this book. This is probably not for everyone. For the Rabbit books alone (and even "Memories of the Ford Administration") I will always read a new Updike.

PS: I "read" this on Audio CD and Kate Reading's performance was dynamic and gripping; very well done.

The early buzz on this book was resoundingly negative, so I wasn't especially interested in trying it. Then I picked up a copy of "The Witches of Eastwick" in a used bookstore and reread it. Within a couple of hours of completing "Witches," I went on to "Widows" and was happily surprised.

Updike knows his characters well enough that Alex, Jane and Sukie are the same women they were in the first book. All the other little details from "Witches" - the description of the towns, the women's past lives, the other families in Eastwick - are intact. Therefore, if you read the two books back to back as I did, you'll see a wonderful continuity that makes "Widows" seem more like a planned continuation rather than that cursed word "sequel" and all the disappointments it conjures.

There is still some of the magic of the original book, but this time out we get a sobering look at the art of growing older and watching the world change around you. Alex, Sukie and Jane look at a world where strip malls and sprawl have replaced the Nature they once knew. They lament the death of sin in an "anything goes" culture as well as their role in a world of true dangers. Plus, they have never gotten over their guilt regarding the death of Jenny Gabriel, more than thirty years earlier. A summer spent in Eastwick gives the women an opportunity to not only reconnect, but face the lingering shadows of their dalliance with dark magic.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit; Updike's powers have not deserted him. I wasn't thrilled that Updike's characters still refer to gay men as "fags" and "fairies." It was much more believable that the women would have thought that way in the late 60s but considering the societal changes and the fact that Alex is an Earth mother type and lives among artistic people, much harder to fathom. Perhaps Updike is still stuck in those pre-Stonewall modes of thinking, but I'd like to think some positive things in society, to counterbalance man's obsessive need to build over Nature, would have occurred in the character's lives.

More than 30 years has passed since the three lusty, thirty-something divorcees of Eastwick, Rhode Island, romped through the bedrooms of nearly every married man in town, casting their spells and rightfully earning their reputations as wicked witches of the East. After accidentally murdering a local woman with their ill-conceived magical mischief, they left the village behind and were never heard from again.

Together, they attracted a powerful current of wickedness, but apart they were nothing more or less than normal women pursuing normal lives with husbands, careers and families. They have kept in casual contact over the years with the occasional card or phone call, but without their mysterious cone of power, their interests have diverged.

Now approaching age 70, the women are all widowed. Alexandra, the eldest and perhaps most caring of the three, has settled near Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, who has gained fame as a potter. When he dies, she stokes her wanderlust with a trip to Canada. Upon her return she finds a letter from Jane, the dour, acidic one of the trio, who has recently lost her husband and suggests an overseas trip. In Egypt, Jane puckishly tries a small spell in a pharaoh's tomb --- just to see if the old sizzle is still there. Startled, Alexandra thinks she sees the mummy move but, not anxious to bring back the old days, ignores it. On a trip to China, another ancient artifact seems oddly alive in Jane's presence, and she suspects that her friend is up to her old tricks.

When they return from their second trip, they hear from Sukie, the younger, vivacious cellist, that she too has lost her husband. Sukie now lives in Massachusetts, and they invite her to join them on another overseas adventure. Her financial situation is not as secure as her two old friends, so she suggests that they spend the summer back in Eastwick. When they hear that the mansion where they first discovered their powers under the spell of Daryl Van Horn has been turned into a timeshare condo property, they rent a suite.

Alexandra, Jane and Sukie may have put Eastwick behind them, but Eastwick hasn't forgotten them. Someone or something there is out for retribution, and the ladies discover that the devilish Daryl Van Horn's experiments with electrical currents may have some lasting effects. The temptation to regenerate their old powers proves irresistible, and they lure the person they suspect is doing them harm to the scene of their former magical experimentations with unexpected and tragic results.

The Widows of Eastwick, like all mortal souls, are diminished by their years yet strengthened by their experience. As they encounter their old lovers and rivals, they are confronted with sometimes ugly and often amusing truths about themselves.

John Updike's mastery of our language and uncanny ability to touch on women's inner psyches holds this story of aging beauty together perhaps better than the plot. His introspective musings on the human experience of watching advancing years chip away at our still youthful desires and ambitions is at once wistful, painful and intuitive. Updike is legion among novelists who chronicle vivid characters (for example the Rabbit series) through meaningful introspection. More than just a roguishly timed publication about witches (it is almost Halloween after all), THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK will haunt the reader's self-awareness of time's cruel inevitability.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea

I more and more discover that the Updike I really care about is not the creator of fictions, but the brilliant interpreter of life and culture. Updike as essayist, as cultural commentator moves me far more than Updike as writer of fiction. In this late quite mediocre novel the Updike style , in all its intricacy and fine metaphorical descriptiveness is still at work. The great magic and charm of the Updike sentence is still there. The abiity to document the American reality to provide us with 'pictures' of the world is there. But so is the almost haphazard relation to characters who it seems to me are never really loveable. These are characters for whom lust and desire, the pursuit of pleasure and their own life- satisfaction is central. I have the sense that Updike does not really love his characters the way some other writers do. Only when the character comes close to being some kind of Updike alter- ego is there real feeling for it.

In this work the three witches of Eastwick now in their seventies and widowed returned to the scene of their former adulteries and spellcastings. They return and re-establish the special bond between them but are unable to resist the vengeance of the brother of their 'victim' from the earlier book. There is however little of their former passion and interest. This book has a tiredness which seems to echo that of its principal subjects. Updike documents faithfully this stage of life as he has documented early ones. But this is the stage of little promise and a lot of disappointment.