The Widows of EastwickJohn Updike
Hamish Hamilton, Rs 450
John Updike’s witches return, widowed and wrinkled, but America has moved on

In every literary generation, the most representative writers aren’t necessarily those most obviously tied to the period concerns. Why did John Updike write about wizardry and witchcraft set in a time when Nixon was polarising America? And how did The Witches of Eastwick (1984) become a representative American novel (notwithstanding the later, massacring cinematic adaptation)? Updike — about whom it was acknowledged from the start that he wrote exceedingly well, but doubted in some quarters if he had anything to say — was never liked by the generation of writers that passed into middle-age waiting for him and Philip Roth to go. Updike was the fourth pillar of the triumvirate of post-war American fiction — Saul Bellow, Roth, Norman Mailer — as the Gentile outlier, who rivalled the Jewish masters and yet knew his place. His fiction too would spring from the death of the American Dream, from the inexplicable yet axiomatic paradox of life going on as it heads nowhere. But not with as much high drama. Yet, wasn’t Rabbit drama enough? Updike is the poet (and he is a versifier too) of suburban/small-town America’s hidden heartbreaks and joie de vivre — sex, adultery, discord, divorce, decay and death.

The Witches, while it dealt with all this, was, however, a break with the Rabbit Angstrom books. If Rabbit felt things had run their course, Alexandra, Jane and Sukie — the three witches — lit a pseudo-feminist path to women’s empowerment, bringing back hope. They were “empowered” divorcees, in a small Rhode Island town, devouring the men and using sorcery to destroy other people’s lives, not excluding murder, suicide and sterility. The devil in flesh was an Eastwick newcomer named Darryl Van Horne (played by Jack Nicholson) — the comic, evil and intellectual centre of their lives. But through their myriad desires, Updike showed how mundane their lives, all lives, are — witchcraft (the “maleficia”) gets you no more than a little warmth and sex, and a lot of calumny and hatred. And small-town America continues unabated, unchanged. But the strongest indignation in the book was at the treatment of female divorcees, in closed minds and closed societies. All of it was darkly comic, punctuated by pathos, just as violence underlies the “effortless”, smooth Updike prose.

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