The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

By John Updike

Reviewed by John Murphy

“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.

Can evil ever be undone? The scene of the crime was the “scene of our primes,” puns one of the witches, and a return to Eastwick inevitably marks a confrontation with what has been, and what will be, as each of the trio grapples with their own mortality. Updike, who has a medievalist’s sensitivity to symbolism, used the three women’s witchcraft in the first book as a metaphor for women’s liberation, an age when some women were testing the limits of their newfound freedom. Now, in Widows of Eastwick, they are facing the more difficult task of reparation, of undoing the damage too much freedom without responsibility can cause.

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.”