After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie--now widowed but still witches--return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, "the scene of their primes," site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a "haven of wholesomeness" populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike is at his very best--a legendary master of literary magic up to his old delightful tricks.


From the Paperback edition.

i. The Coven Reconstituted

Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our venerable town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable. Wicked methods make weak products. Satan counterfeits Creation, yes, but with inferior goods.

Alexandra, the oldest in age, the broadest in body, and the nearest in character to normal, generous-spirited humanity, was the first to become a widow. Her instinct, as with so many a wife suddenly liberated into solitude, was to travel--as if the world at large, by way of flimsy boarding cards and tedious airport delays and the faint but undeniable risk of flight in a time of rising fuel costs, airline bankruptcy, suicidal terrorists, and accumulating metal fatigue, could be compelled to yield the fruitful aggravation of having a mate. Jim Farlander, the husband she had conjured for herself from a hollowed pumpkin, a cowboy hat, and a pinch of Western soil scraped from inside the back fender of a pickup truck with Colorado plates that she had seen parked, looking eerily out of place, on Oak Street in the early 1970s, had, as their marriage settled and hardened, proved difficult to budge from his ceramics studio and little-frequented pottery shop on a side street in Taos, New Mexico.

Jim's idea of a trip had been the hour's drive south to Santa Fe; his idea of a holiday was spending a day in one of the Indian reservations--Navajo, Zuni, Apache, Acoma, Isleta Pueblo--spying out what the Native American potters were offering in the reservation souvenir shops, and hoping to pick up cheap in some dusty Indian Bureau commissary an authentic old black-and-white geometric Pueblo jar or a red-on-buff Hohokam storage jar, with its spiral-and-maze pattern, which he could peddle for a small fortune to a newly endowed museum in one of the burgeoning resort cities of the Southwest. Jim liked where he was, and Alexandra liked that in him, since she as his wife was part of where he was. She liked his lean build (a flat stomach to the day he died, and never performed a sit-up in his life) and the saddle smell of his sweat and the scent of clay that clung, like a sepia aura, to his strong and knowing hands. They had met, on the natural plane, when she, for some time divorced, had taken a course at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he had been enlisted as a fill-in instructor. The four stepchildren--Marcy, Ben, Linda, Eric--that she saddled him with couldn't have asked for a calmer, more soothingly taciturn father-substitute. He was easier for her children--half out of the nest in any case, Marcy being all of eighteen--to relate to than their own father, Oswald Spofford, a small manufacturer of kitchen fixtures from Norwich, Connecticut. Poor Ozzie had become so earnestly involved in Little League baseball and company bowling that no one, not even his children, could take him seriously.

People had taken Jim Farlander seriously, women and children especially, giving him back his own coiled silence. His level gray eyes had the glint of a gun from within the shade of his wide-brimmed hat, its crown darkened where his thumb and fingers pinched it. When he was at the pottery wheel he tied a faded blue bandana around his head to keep his long hair--gray but still streaked with its original sun-bleached auburn and gathered behind into an eight-inch ponytail--out of the clay, wet and spinning on the foot-powered wheel. A fall in his teens from a horse had left him with a limp, and the wheel, which he...

 

"John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone . . . has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose . . . This isn't writing. It is magic . . . Updike's asperities on age reflect back on himself, but not in the way we might expect. At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page . . . [Updike's subject is] nothing less than ‘the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America.' No writer of our time has reached into it so deeply or conjured so many of its mysteries so pulsingly to life."

 

"If wit is a form of witchcraft, igniting sparks from airy nothingness, concocting a peppery brew of words, then John Updike's powers are undiminished . . . In wickedly glinting sentences, Updike explores the distinctly unmagical humiliations of advancing age, and the prickly temptations of sin."

 

"The Widows of Eastwick might just be his best novel since 1990's Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit at Rest."

 

"There's no one quite like John Updike for a trip to New England. History, theology, period-detailed houses and frequent sex whiz by in a blur of inimitable writing . . . Thank whatever deity you happen to worship . . . because Updike has now written The Widows of Eastwick, a frolicsome new book about the trio [of witches of Eastwick]. As with New England autumns, we witness a maturing of these women's natures–a last, hot-red, end-of-season change as rendered by this literary sorcerer."

 

"Vibrant characters, careful detailing, and a sense of anticipation of impending dire events leave this an absorbing read, enjoyable to its fullest even by readers unfamiliar with its predecessor."

 

"[I]ts seamless blending of dexterously plotted narrative with penetrating characterizations . . . evoke with nearly Tolstoyan poignancy the weary, resigned clairvoyance of old age . . ."

 

"Updike hasn't only written a stunner. This serious literary novelist has also used romance fiction to supply important insights into what narrative art of any kind consists of: tons of hard work and a devotion to detail. The luminosity of Widows confirms the wisdom of his advice."

 

"The Widows of Eastwick is by turns funny, philosophical, suspenseful, and sad. At 76, Updike remains America's greatest writer, invoking his distinctive brand of magical realism in an elegantly written, occasionally crabby, often moving meditation on original sin, aging, and atonement . . . Updike provides in Widows a penetrating and poignant portrait of the domestic lives of women, married and single, so many of whom feel disempowered or warped."

 

The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
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