» The Widows of Eastwick

The Widows of Eastwick Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: The Astral Plane
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Subtle and Well-Polished Sequel
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Widow Review
Comment: Loved a follow up to The Witches of Eastwick- Always wondered what happened to these Women! Also love John Updikes's work!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Aging
Comment: John Updike's new novel, The Widows of Eastwick, is a sequel to his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick. Alexandra, Jane and Sukie are older, slower, and remain true to the personalities readers met in the earlier novel. Updike begins this novel slowly with the widows traveling to Egypt and China. The pace increases when they agree to see what it would be like to return to Eastwick, Rhode Island. These women and the town have both mellowed, and as the memories and guilt of their lives in Eastwick increase, the three decide to try witchcraft again to right their past wrongs. Not everything works out as planned. Updike's prose can become mesmorizing on these pages, a spell in and of itself. While few may rate The Widows of Eastwick as his finest work, it's a welcome treat.


Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Wordsmith for Our Time
Comment: Updike has been around for years and his command of our language is superb. This coupled with his wit and grasp of "the American" way has made him one of the foremost chroniclers of the American psyche.

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