If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.

Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", 24 Oct 2008
(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 Darryn 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, they know that he 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 deed, 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 their 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, my all-time favorite Updike creation, imho one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest": A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit ... at Rest" (Everyman's Library Classics)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.

Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", 24 Oct 2008
(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 Darryn 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, they know that he 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 deed, 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 their 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, my all-time favorite Updike creation, imho one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest": A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit ... at Rest" (Everyman's Library Classics)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)



the witches of eastwick, 20 Aug 2007
Reading The Witches of Eastwick was slightly surreal for two reasons. One is that when I saw the film all those eons ago, I had no idea it was based on a book by Updike, and Jack Nicholson was so potent in his portrayal of Darryl Van Horne that his image haunts the book. The second is that Updike is one of my favourite authors, mainly because he can describe the mundanities of normal life with such perspicuity and acute perception that it makes my spine tingle. So I wasn't sure how I felt about him writing about witches - women with supernatural powers. Being on par with Richard Dawkins about this subject enflamed this disbelief.

Yet I greatly enjoyed The Witches of Eastwick. Most people will be familiar with its story through the eponymous film - three divorced women, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane, become swept into the life of Darryl Van Horne, a droll, unconventional and magnetically sexy newcomer to their small town. The divorcees have magic powers which they have used to avenge themselves in past situations - causing a dog to die here, a necklace to snap there. But their growing obsession with this suave man calls on them to increase the magnitude of their spells.

The first thing to say is that Jack Nicholson was Van Horne down to the hair on his back. The drawl, the slightly repugnant air, the staggering confidence, the je ne sais quoi which transformed this hirsute little man into an object of desire.

Updike's prose is as crisp and perceptive as ever. Whether he is describing the physical characteristics of a person or a landscape, he has the ability to make you draw in breath in admiration or suppress a chuckle. Here he is on an irritating old lady's throat:

'Mrs Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls...'

Often, he is poetic:

'... of mist licking the autumnal surface of a woodland pond, and of the spheres of ever-thinner gas that our astronauts pierce without puncturing, so that the sky's blue does not leak away.'

As always, Updike has the power to see everyday objects with an unjaundiced eye so that the reader thinks, 'hey, that's really clever - it DOES look like that'. Here he is on pebbles under water:

'Brown pebbles stared up at her refracted and meaninglessly vivid, like the letters of an alphabet one doesn't know.'

Updike's sharp ability to encapsulate and articulate is as true of people's feelings as of physical descriptions. Here he is on the relief one feels when exposed and accepted:

'He knows my age', Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime.'

Or this on the path to that stage:

'Her prompt nakedness put her at a disadvantage; she had devalued herself.'

And there is much wry humour too. On a man's confidence to his mistress about his wife's sexuality, reported back to the mistress's gaggle of cackling friends:

'She had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.'

Or an observation on intonation:

'There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather.'

As always, I was struck by the expertise with which Updike writes about such a range of topics. I don't simply mean his ability to turn his pen to describing life in its huge variety, although he does that too. I am referring to his knowledge about so many different fields. Tennis, Pop Art, Impressionism, Bach, piano and cello techniques, the intricacies of nature - yet never do you feel that he is stretching himself thin; there is always an impressive expertise about the subject he is dissecting. And he throws his knowledge in in such a light, airy way that there is never ponderous or didactic lecturing or self-conscious showing off, his knowledge is wafted in the breeze sweetly, like blossom in spring.

My only reservation about this book is my scepticism about magic and my questions related to that (eg 'if the witches could do X by magic, surely they must have been able to do Y, which would have solved all their problems at the beginning... and aborted the story'.)
Everything else is entertaining and wonderfully written, from the characterisation to the quality of the prose. But then, as far as I'm concerned, Updike is one of those rare literary geniuses that can do no wrong.

1/2
__________________

Charming tale of the supernatural meeting the everyday., 19 Jun 2002
A wickedly delightful novel by Updike. A story that not only entertains with its lively and humourous narrative, but also an imaginative portrayal of a small town determined to hold on to its ordinariness and the three women who are a reminder that life is to be enjoyed. After reading this, I am definitely a fan of Updike.

If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.

Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", 24 Oct 2008
(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 Darryn 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, they know that he 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 deed, 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 their 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, my all-time favorite Updike creation, imho one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest": A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit ... at Rest" (Everyman's Library Classics)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)



the witches of eastwick, 20 Aug 2007
Reading The Witches of Eastwick was slightly surreal for two reasons. One is that when I saw the film all those eons ago, I had no idea it was based on a book by Updike, and Jack Nicholson was so potent in his portrayal of Darryl Van Horne that his image haunts the book. The second is that Updike is one of my favourite authors, mainly because he can describe the mundanities of normal life with such perspicuity and acute perception that it makes my spine tingle. So I wasn't sure how I felt about him writing about witches - women with supernatural powers. Being on par with Richard Dawkins about this subject enflamed this disbelief.

Yet I greatly enjoyed The Witches of Eastwick. Most people will be familiar with its story through the eponymous film - three divorced women, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane, become swept into the life of Darryl Van Horne, a droll, unconventional and magnetically sexy newcomer to their small town. The divorcees have magic powers which they have used to avenge themselves in past situations - causing a dog to die here, a necklace to snap there. But their growing obsession with this suave man calls on them to increase the magnitude of their spells.

The first thing to say is that Jack Nicholson was Van Horne down to the hair on his back. The drawl, the slightly repugnant air, the staggering confidence, the je ne sais quoi which transformed this hirsute little man into an object of desire.

Updike's prose is as crisp and perceptive as ever. Whether he is describing the physical characteristics of a person or a landscape, he has the ability to make you draw in breath in admiration or suppress a chuckle. Here he is on an irritating old lady's throat:

'Mrs Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls...'

Often, he is poetic:

'... of mist licking the autumnal surface of a woodland pond, and of the spheres of ever-thinner gas that our astronauts pierce without puncturing, so that the sky's blue does not leak away.'

As always, Updike has the power to see everyday objects with an unjaundiced eye so that the reader thinks, 'hey, that's really clever - it DOES look like that'. Here he is on pebbles under water:

'Brown pebbles stared up at her refracted and meaninglessly vivid, like the letters of an alphabet one doesn't know.'

Updike's sharp ability to encapsulate and articulate is as true of people's feelings as of physical descriptions. Here he is on the relief one feels when exposed and accepted:

'He knows my age', Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime.'

Or this on the path to that stage:

'Her prompt nakedness put her at a disadvantage; she had devalued herself.'

And there is much wry humour too. On a man's confidence to his mistress about his wife's sexuality, reported back to the mistress's gaggle of cackling friends:

'She had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.'

Or an observation on intonation:

'There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather.'

As always, I was struck by the expertise with which Updike writes about such a range of topics. I don't simply mean his ability to turn his pen to describing life in its huge variety, although he does that too. I am referring to his knowledge about so many different fields. Tennis, Pop Art, Impressionism, Bach, piano and cello techniques, the intricacies of nature - yet never do you feel that he is stretching himself thin; there is always an impressive expertise about the subject he is dissecting. And he throws his knowledge in in such a light, airy way that there is never ponderous or didactic lecturing or self-conscious showing off, his knowledge is wafted in the breeze sweetly, like blossom in spring.

My only reservation about this book is my scepticism about magic and my questions related to that (eg 'if the witches could do X by magic, surely they must have been able to do Y, which would have solved all their problems at the beginning... and aborted the story'.)
Everything else is entertaining and wonderfully written, from the characterisation to the quality of the prose. But then, as far as I'm concerned, Updike is one of those rare literary geniuses that can do no wrong.

1/2
__________________

Charming tale of the supernatural meeting the everyday., 19 Jun 2002
A wickedly delightful novel by Updike. A story that not only entertains with its lively and humourous narrative, but also an imaginative portrayal of a small town determined to hold on to its ordinariness and the three women who are a reminder that life is to be enjoyed. After reading this, I am definitely a fan of Updike.

Not his best, 13 Oct 2008
I've given this 4 stars which is a bit harsh and I should explain that I'm comparing it with Updike's other works which are mostly 6 out of 5. But Updike at cruise-control is still fantastic compared to most other authors at full throttle. Couples reprises the familiar themes of adultery, sex addiction (before there was a condition for it) and marital boredom. However, the conversations of the characters seemed unbelievable: all you could hear was Updike talking, or one of his alter egos. Some of the other characters, especially the women, just wouldn't talk like that. Unlike other Updike novels, this one took me a while to finish because I couldn't take that much of it in one sitting. If you've never experienced Updike, you'll still be pretty impressed at his writing. But I recommend you start with the Rabbit trilogy to get pure literary pleasure from this genius.

welcome to the post-pill paradise, 09 Aug 2008

The novel is set in a promiscuous, heavy drinking and well-off circle of young married friends in the fictional sea-side Boston suburb of Tarbox. The novel takes place in 1963 around the time of the assassination of JFK.

Welcome to the post-pill paradise....

These ironic words occur many times in Couples and give a clue to the central theme of the book. How do these young, mostly highly educated and well-to-do thirty something couples, deal with the opportunities that risk-free contraception and a new more open attitude to sex offer for the first time in America. They have wealth, time, opportunity and the desire to experiment. Do they, the novel asks, find themselves in paradise or a kind of hell in which all previous moral absolutes have gone ?

The 8 or 9 couples live close-knit lives, sharing holidays, parties, school runs and frequently, sexual partners. Their master of ceremonies, the odious dentist Freddie, encourages this sexual freedom in which he takes virtually no part. Piet Hanema, the central male character, is an inveterate womaniser and interestingly, the only non-academic in the group, he is a carpenter. He also remains friends with all his previous partners as he is attractive and undemanding. His transgressive relationship with the heavily pregnant Foxy Whitworth causes deep rifts and disquiet in the group. Hedonistic freedom comes, Updike makes it clear, with a heavy price and Piet and Foxy pay.

The writing is wonderful. Updike at his clear, passionate and insightful best leads us deep into the lives of his characters through his way of writing from the inside out. We feel, see and experience life as lived by those characters in that time and place.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike has become most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery". A subject which, he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." There is no sign of exhaustion in this early novel though, He writes honestly, with fire in his belly and out of anger, deep disgust as well as a desire to explain and to understand.

If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.

Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", 24 Oct 2008
(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 Darryn 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, they know that he 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 deed, 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 their 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, my all-time favorite Updike creation, imho one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest": A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit ... at Rest" (Everyman's Library Classics)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)



the witches of eastwick, 20 Aug 2007
Reading The Witches of Eastwick was slightly surreal for two reasons. One is that when I saw the film all those eons ago, I had no idea it was based on a book by Updike, and Jack Nicholson was so potent in his portrayal of Darryl Van Horne that his image haunts the book. The second is that Updike is one of my favourite authors, mainly because he can describe the mundanities of normal life with such perspicuity and acute perception that it makes my spine tingle. So I wasn't sure how I felt about him writing about witches - women with supernatural powers. Being on par with Richard Dawkins about this subject enflamed this disbelief.

Yet I greatly enjoyed The Witches of Eastwick. Most people will be familiar with its story through the eponymous film - three divorced women, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane, become swept into the life of Darryl Van Horne, a droll, unconventional and magnetically sexy newcomer to their small town. The divorcees have magic powers which they have used to avenge themselves in past situations - causing a dog to die here, a necklace to snap there. But their growing obsession with this suave man calls on them to increase the magnitude of their spells.

The first thing to say is that Jack Nicholson was Van Horne down to the hair on his back. The drawl, the slightly repugnant air, the staggering confidence, the je ne sais quoi which transformed this hirsute little man into an object of desire.

Updike's prose is as crisp and perceptive as ever. Whether he is describing the physical characteristics of a person or a landscape, he has the ability to make you draw in breath in admiration or suppress a chuckle. Here he is on an irritating old lady's throat:

'Mrs Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls...'

Often, he is poetic:

'... of mist licking the autumnal surface of a woodland pond, and of the spheres of ever-thinner gas that our astronauts pierce without puncturing, so that the sky's blue does not leak away.'

As always, Updike has the power to see everyday objects with an unjaundiced eye so that the reader thinks, 'hey, that's really clever - it DOES look like that'. Here he is on pebbles under water:

'Brown pebbles stared up at her refracted and meaninglessly vivid, like the letters of an alphabet one doesn't know.'

Updike's sharp ability to encapsulate and articulate is as true of people's feelings as of physical descriptions. Here he is on the relief one feels when exposed and accepted:

'He knows my age', Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime.'

Or this on the path to that stage:

'Her prompt nakedness put her at a disadvantage; she had devalued herself.'

And there is much wry humour too. On a man's confidence to his mistress about his wife's sexuality, reported back to the mistress's gaggle of cackling friends:

'She had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.'

Or an observation on intonation:

'There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather.'

As always, I was struck by the expertise with which Updike writes about such a range of topics. I don't simply mean his ability to turn his pen to describing life in its huge variety, although he does that too. I am referring to his knowledge about so many different fields. Tennis, Pop Art, Impressionism, Bach, piano and cello techniques, the intricacies of nature - yet never do you feel that he is stretching himself thin; there is always an impressive expertise about the subject he is dissecting. And he throws his knowledge in in such a light, airy way that there is never ponderous or didactic lecturing or self-conscious showing off, his knowledge is wafted in the breeze sweetly, like blossom in spring.

My only reservation about this book is my scepticism about magic and my questions related to that (eg 'if the witches could do X by magic, surely they must have been able to do Y, which would have solved all their problems at the beginning... and aborted the story'.)
Everything else is entertaining and wonderfully written, from the characterisation to the quality of the prose. But then, as far as I'm concerned, Updike is one of those rare literary geniuses that can do no wrong.

1/2
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Charming tale of the supernatural meeting the everyday., 19 Jun 2002
A wickedly delightful novel by Updike. A story that not only entertains with its lively and humourous narrative, but also an imaginative portrayal of a small town determined to hold on to its ordinariness and the three women who are a reminder that life is to be enjoyed. After reading this, I am definitely a fan of Updike.

Not his best, 13 Oct 2008
I've given this 4 stars which is a bit harsh and I should explain that I'm comparing it with Updike's other works which are mostly 6 out of 5. But Updike at cruise-control is still fantastic compared to most other authors at full throttle. Couples reprises the familiar themes of adultery, sex addiction (before there was a condition for it) and marital boredom. However, the conversations of the characters seemed unbelievable: all you could hear was Updike talking, or one of his alter egos. Some of the other characters, especially the women, just wouldn't talk like that. Unlike other Updike novels, this one took me a while to finish because I couldn't take that much of it in one sitting. If you've never experienced Updike, you'll still be pretty impressed at his writing. But I recommend you start with the Rabbit trilogy to get pure literary pleasure from this genius.

welcome to the post-pill paradise, 09 Aug 2008

The novel is set in a promiscuous, heavy drinking and well-off circle of young married friends in the fictional sea-side Boston suburb of Tarbox. The novel takes place in 1963 around the time of the assassination of JFK.

Welcome to the post-pill paradise....

These ironic words occur many times in Couples and give a clue to the central theme of the book. How do these young, mostly highly educated and well-to-do thirty something couples, deal with the opportunities that risk-free contraception and a new more open attitude to sex offer for the first time in America. They have wealth, time, opportunity and the desire to experiment. Do they, the novel asks, find themselves in paradise or a kind of hell in which all previous moral absolutes have gone ?

The 8 or 9 couples live close-knit lives, sharing holidays, parties, school runs and frequently, sexual partners. Their master of ceremonies, the odious dentist Freddie, encourages this sexual freedom in which he takes virtually no part. Piet Hanema, the central male character, is an inveterate womaniser and interestingly, the only non-academic in the group, he is a carpenter. He also remains friends with all his previous partners as he is attractive and undemanding. His transgressive relationship with the heavily pregnant Foxy Whitworth causes deep rifts and disquiet in the group. Hedonistic freedom comes, Updike makes it clear, with a heavy price and Piet and Foxy pay.

The writing is wonderful. Updike at his clear, passionate and insightful best leads us deep into the lives of his characters through his way of writing from the inside out. We feel, see and experience life as lived by those characters in that time and place.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike has become most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery". A subject which, he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." There is no sign of exhaustion in this early novel though, He writes honestly, with fire in his belly and out of anger, deep disgust as well as a desire to explain and to understand.


"He'll get by without his rabbit pie ... run, rabbit, run rabbit, run run run ...", 13 Aug 2008
'Rabbit, Run' is the first in a quartet of novels by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist that revolve around the varying fortunes of a former high school Basketball champion Rabbit Angstrom. All four novels were written at the end of the a decade and published at the beginning of the next, and give a subjective flavour of modern American life as lived in small-town mediocrity. Angstrom observes the rapid transformations of the late 1950s here, and later the 60s (Rabbit Redux), 70s (Rabbit is Rich) and 80s (Rabbit at Rest), but is rather buffeted by them, lucid but always overwhelmed.

Updike makes it clear in his fascinating afterword that Rabbit "was for me a way in - a ticket to America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, thought the difference is often slight". Thus there is an exploratory unruliness to Updike's writing, an anything-goes, that enables the writer to abandon his lofty authorial seat and rove around, eyes wide open. It's a seedy, cynical novel with few really likeable characters. Visceral and provocative, it rarely shirks from a rather dank explicitness that belies it's early 1960s first publication (although, in fact, a number of forced original cuts have been reinstated here).

Despite the need to chronical the life and times Updike consciously avoids the bigger contemporaneous themes, but concentrates on what is lived and felt by ordinary people of the period. He delves with stealth, and without ceremony, into the perspective of a number of other characters, often in rambling stream-of-consciousness. One almost unpunctuated chapter depicts Rabbit's wife losing control in drunkedness and accidently drowning her baby. It's brutal and horrific, more so as the brakes are taken off the writing, expediting Janice's decline into drunken madness.

It is the stylistic freedom Updike permits himself which makes his writing so penetrating. He panders to no formalistic strictures, and thus - like Rabbit Angstrom - runs with irresponsible abandon into new predicaments. "Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed", the author remarks in the afterword, "I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human". 'Rabbit, Run' makes no concessions to resolution, and it begins the quartet as it continued, with a sense of maddening, but very human, indecisiveness.

Updike also adds in the afterword that Rabbit, Run was in part a conscious reaction to Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', published a few years before, with its clarion call to break free from the constraints of conservative America. The book is an examination of "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behid get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties' fraying but still tight social weave". This is not to suggest Updike's novel is a cautionary note about the dangers of "cutting loose", but that it presents a bleakly unromantic alternative to the beat paradigm: that some people cannot extricate themselves from their lives cleanly or even satisfyingly. Certainly, there is nothing clean about Rabbit's escape, but a sense of bloody rupture suggested by his baby's premature death. "Boy, you really have the touch of death, don't you?", mocks Angstrom's prostitute mistress in the final chapter, and it is this morbid pallor that hangs inauspiciously over the whole novel. A vital, if dispiriting read.

rabbit run, 09 Apr 2008
this is the first book i have ever read of john updikes.i cant say i enjoyed reading this,but i dont think i was meant to. the main protagonist harry " rabbit" angstrom is probably the most self centred and morally repugnunt individual i have ever read about, but that is the beauty of this book.you feel yourself appalled at rabbits moral bankrupcy.
you forget that he is a fictional character.this is a beautifully written book.for all his faults i think i might end up reading the futher adventures of rabbit.he may be self centred,but he is an interesting read.

The dreariness of a 'second rate' suburban existence..., 01 Mar 2007
This book tells the story of the once great college sportsman Harry 'rabbit' Angstrom, who at the age of twenty six has made nothing of his former talent and feels trapped in a loveless marriage, to an alcoholic wife who is unable to keep their home and young son under control. Rabbit is stifled by his dreary suburban existence and cannot escape the feeling that having once been a 'first rate' sportsman, being second rate just doesnt cut it. Unable to accept his life as it is, Harry walks out on his wife and child and begins a complicated journey to rid himself of his dull existence. Along the way, meeting his one time sports coach Mr. Tothero and striking up an odd friendship with a priest.

The book explores the suburban experience of an outsider, one who cannot conform to the life he has become tangled up in. In much the same manner as writers like John Cheever and Richard Yates, this book explores the disasterous effects of characters whose expectations of life have been seriously diminished.

This book is really well written and has a clear narrative voice, while the reader may not agree with Harry's actions, we cannot help but become immersed in his world. This book is the first of four 'Rabbit' books which follow Harry throughout his life, but also acts as a great introduction to Updike. Highly recommended!

Rabbit, Run - John Updike, 04 Sep 2006
Many good writers can tell an engrossing story, but only the best manage to reach inside your head and grasp perceptions that you yourself had never acknowledged but instantly recognise, shudder or smile at, and empathise with when you read. Suddenly you are there with the characters, experiencing everything they see, feel, hear, smell, taste and touch, every twinge, every furrowed brow and fleeting thought. John Updike is one of those masters and many of his descriptions stay in your head forever. I can't look at rhododendrons without remembering his description of them in Rabbit, Run - 'when the first blooms came, they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the side of their heads...but when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds, they remind him of...the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter'.
All the Rabbit books are beautifully written. Rabbit's indecisiveness, his angst and discontent, are painted with an incredibly masterly touch, as are his effects on those around him. Updike captures not only characters but the whole human predicament. His insights are second to none - with a few well chosen words he can nail a feeling, thought or action where other lesser authors would struggle and use ten times as many less suitable words.
My only slight disappointment about Updike is that many of his characters are so stereotypically 'male'. They are able to fall out of love when their wives fall into depressed alcoholism, their hair thins, they lose interest in sex, or they become overweight, able to walk out on partners and kids without seeing to miss them, or with only a flicker of self-indulgent angst. But Updike's ability to synthesise people of all sorts is evident from his descriptions of peripheral characters, in particular, females, so his cynicism about the male race is not due to shallowness but a perhaps realistic perception of the superficiality and/or flaws of some men and women. A writer, then, not of cosy tales and romantic dreams, but of life in all its grit and truth, good, bad, ugly and funny. The man is a genius.




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soooo good!, 20 Oct 2005
In describing postwar America of the 1950s, many historians evoke images of the mundane: the organization man, the gray-flannel suit, mass exodus to suburbia, proliferation of television sets into middle-class households, and the sterility of "Leave it to Beaver" family life, all illustrating stagnation and complacency. Along with conformity, this almost involuntary collectivism brings alienation of the individual to a society of insecure citizens, who seem to constantly exchange sidelong glances with each other in search of cultural affirmation. Both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) exemplify vain struggles to assert individual identities in mid-century American culture. Updike successfully illustrates the introspective struggle of the "silent majority" through Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the ambivalent non-hero of Rabbit, Run. Through themes of religion, physical action, and responsibility, John Updike suggests the stuffiness, disillusionment, and ambivalence pervasive in 1950s American life struggling to cope with a conformist postwar identity. One of the most prominent themes of Rabbit, Run is religious duplicity and a fundamental questioning of Christianity. This ambivalence is manifest through the rather ineffective Episcopalian minister, Jack Eccles, who exists as a collage of religious dogma, having taking his own muddled path of Protestantism away from that of his father and grandfather, also ministers. Eccles seems much more effective as a social worker than a minister, traveling around from house to house hoping to reconstruct Harry Angstrom's rubble of a nuclear family. He receives a rather severe reprimand from his colleague, Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach who labels Eccles a "minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf" (154). As a result, even the most significant figure of religious guidance in the community seems confused about his social role. Updike continues to discredit religious faith in Rabbit's perception of the church. Early on, he admits to Ruth Leonard, his part time prostitute lover, that he does believe in some divine force, but immediately wonders if he is lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement...their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of an unseen world. (81) Angstrom acknowledges the existence of a higher authority, but seems confused about its source or location. Later he observes the crowds filing into Eccles' parish, "even the plainest walk...glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief" (214). Though he questions Christian imposition of mores and standards on modern society, Angstrom still holds a fundamental appreciation and respect for the sacrosanct belief "in something." Several times Harry Angstrom experiences quasi-existentialist epiphanies, once on the golf course with his minister friend: Very simply he brings the club head around his shoulder into [the ball]. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. [...] It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes his hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. "That's it!" (121). In this figurative leap of faith, he discovers clear evidence of a God-like existence. Harry consistently reveals his belief in something resembling religious experience throughout the novel, though he rather bluntly rejects the traditional values of a Christian society. He oscillates between religious disillusionment and a somewhat curious acknowledgment of a higher power, but he never really develops any concrete idea or definition to explain his emotional phenomenon. Rather he offers only an ability to identify the feeling. Rabbit's religious confusion speaks to a larger community of skeptical believers, those generally experiencing a similar middle-class nonexistence as the main character. His spiritual restlessness subverts blind acceptance of Christianity as America's faith. Another dominant theme of Rabbit, Run lies in the exhilaration of physical perfection. Rabbit lives for the adrenalized intensity of physical and emotional climax, through his past basketball career, the perfect golf shot, or sexual dominance over his female counterparts. Intertwined with his religious disillusionment, the idea of physical perfection provides Rabbit with evidence of a greater existence above his mundane occupation as a MagiPeel salesman in suburban Brewer, Pennsylvania. He revels in his past success as a star basketball player, elated "that his touch still lives in his hands," a physical liberation from his "long gloom" of conventional life since high school glory days (3). Adulterous sexual activity provides the animalistic Rabbit with his other major physical release, though it ultimately leads to dejection as he reproduces at the rate of his namesake, impregnating both his wife, Janice, and his lover, Ruth. Even at sexual climax, Ruth envisions the transparent nature of Rabbit's urges, "as if she knows that as that moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair" (77). The past glory of his basketball career, the fluke shot of an epiphanic golf drive, and the ultimate denial of his natural virility constantly push Harry to search for an ultimate, indefinable truth. Finally, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom expresses frustration in his denial of conventional responsibility. The images of running thread a circular loop through the narrative, from his initial drive to West Virginia at the beginning to his rather inconclusive, desperate attempt to "travel to the next patch of snow" (280). He runs away from his responsibility to his wife, his children, his lover, and Walt Disney's total merchandising of Disneyland on network television. Even in his physical self-removal to West Virginia, Harry meets an alien world: "He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America?" (29) Harry's urge to run symbolizes the introspective dissatisfaction with American institutions, a rebellion against expectations, but one lacking a clear purpose and goal. Rabbit is Odysseus traveling to Ithaca, but without a map to guide his way. In his novel Rabbit, Run, John Updike explores themes of religion, perfection, and responsibility to illustrate the claustrophobia and ambivalence of an average American in the 1950s. Both Updike and Ellison point to the invisibility of the citizen, the disillusionment of individuality in a post-industrial age. What Updike refuses to offer is an ultimate solution to the problem, treating the platitudes of basketball Coach Tothero and Mickey Mouse television advice with a parodic contempt, refusing to accept the paradigms as cohesive solutions to social problems. Updike never suggests a solution to the protagonist's ailment, but demonstrates an indifferent acceptance of roles and responsibility through antagonists to Rabbit's eternal quest for personal freedom. Ultimately, Updike paints the portrait of a man searching for dignity in his possession of freedom, in his possession of the American life. Unable to find it, he runs in disgust.

If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.

Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sin that bothers me.", 24 Oct 2008
(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 Darryn 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, they know that he 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 deed, 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 their 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, my all-time favorite Updike creation, imho one of the best novellas ever written
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest": A Tetralogy - "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit ... at Rest" (Everyman's Library Classics)
Couples
In the Beauty of the Lilies (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge Companions to Literature)



the witches of eastwick, 20 Aug 2007
Reading The Witches of Eastwick was slightly surreal for two reasons. One is that when I saw the film all those eons ago, I had no idea it was based on a book by Updike, and Jack Nicholson was so potent in his portrayal of Darryl Van Horne that his image haunts the book. The second is that Updike is one of my favourite authors, mainly because he can describe the mundanities of normal life with such perspicuity and acute perception that it makes my spine tingle. So I wasn't sure how I felt about him writing about witches - women with supernatural powers. Being on par with Richard Dawkins about this subject enflamed this disbelief.

Yet I greatly enjoyed The Witches of Eastwick. Most people will be familiar with its story through the eponymous film - three divorced women, Alexandra, Sukie and Jane, become swept into the life of Darryl Van Horne, a droll, unconventional and magnetically sexy newcomer to their small town. The divorcees have magic powers which they have used to avenge themselves in past situations - causing a dog to die here, a necklace to snap there. But their growing obsession with this suave man calls on them to increase the magnitude of their spells.

The first thing to say is that Jack Nicholson was Van Horne down to the hair on his back. The drawl, the slightly repugnant air, the staggering confidence, the je ne sais quoi which transformed this hirsute little man into an object of desire.

Updike's prose is as crisp and perceptive as ever. Whether he is describing the physical characteristics of a person or a landscape, he has the ability to make you draw in breath in admiration or suppress a chuckle. Here he is on an irritating old lady's throat:

'Mrs Lovecraft had adorned her wrinkled throat, collapsed upon itself in folds and gulleys like those of an eroded roadside embankment, with a strand of artificial pearls...'

Often, he is poetic:

'... of mist licking the autumnal surface of a woodland pond, and of the spheres of ever-thinner gas that our astronauts pierce without puncturing, so that the sky's blue does not leak away.'

As always, Updike has the power to see everyday objects with an unjaundiced eye so that the reader thinks, 'hey, that's really clever - it DOES look like that'. Here he is on pebbles under water:

'Brown pebbles stared up at her refracted and meaninglessly vivid, like the letters of an alphabet one doesn't know.'

Updike's sharp ability to encapsulate and articulate is as true of people's feelings as of physical descriptions. Here he is on the relief one feels when exposed and accepted:

'He knows my age', Alexandra thought, more relieved than offended. It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with the hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime.'

Or this on the path to that stage:

'Her prompt nakedness put her at a disadvantage; she had devalued herself.'

And there is much wry humour too. On a man's confidence to his mistress about his wife's sexuality, reported back to the mistress's gaggle of cackling friends:

'She had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.'

Or an observation on intonation:

'There was a quality men's voices had when you had slept with them, even years ago: the grain came up, like that of unpainted wood left out in the weather.'

As always, I was struck by the expertise with which Updike writes about such a range of topics. I don't simply mean his ability to turn his pen to describing life in its huge variety, although he does that too. I am referring to his knowledge about so many different fields. Tennis, Pop Art, Impressionism, Bach, piano and cello techniques, the intricacies of nature - yet never do you feel that he is stretching himself thin; there is always an impressive expertise about the subject he is dissecting. And he throws his knowledge in in such a light, airy way that there is never ponderous or didactic lecturing or self-conscious showing off, his knowledge is wafted in the breeze sweetly, like blossom in spring.

My only reservation about this book is my scepticism about magic and my questions related to that (eg 'if the witches could do X by magic, surely they must have been able to do Y, which would have solved all their problems at the beginning... and aborted the story'.)
Everything else is entertaining and wonderfully written, from the characterisation to the quality of the prose. But then, as far as I'm concerned, Updike is one of those rare literary geniuses that can do no wrong.

1/2
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Charming tale of the supernatural meeting the everyday., 19 Jun 2002
A wickedly delightful novel by Updike. A story that not only entertains with its lively and humourous narrative, but also an imaginative portrayal of a small town determined to hold on to its ordinariness and the three women who are a reminder that life is to be enjoyed. After reading this, I am definitely a fan of Updike.

Not his best, 13 Oct 2008
I've given this 4 stars which is a bit harsh and I should explain that I'm comparing it with Updike's other works which are mostly 6 out of 5. But Updike at cruise-control is still fantastic compared to most other authors at full throttle. Couples reprises the familiar themes of adultery, sex addiction (before there was a condition for it) and marital boredom. However, the conversations of the characters seemed unbelievable: all you could hear was Updike talking, or one of his alter egos. Some of the other characters, especially the women, just wouldn't talk like that. Unlike other Updike novels, this one took me a while to finish because I couldn't take that much of it in one sitting. If you've never experienced Updike, you'll still be pretty impressed at his writing. But I recommend you start with the Rabbit trilogy to get pure literary pleasure from this genius.

welcome to the post-pill paradise, 09 Aug 2008

The novel is set in a promiscuous, heavy drinking and well-off circle of young married friends in the fictional sea-side Boston suburb of Tarbox. The novel takes place in 1963 around the time of the assassination of JFK.

Welcome to the post-pill paradise....

These ironic words occur many times in Couples and give a clue to the central theme of the book. How do these young, mostly highly educated and well-to-do thirty something couples, deal with the opportunities that risk-free contraception and a new more open attitude to sex offer for the first time in America. They have wealth, time, opportunity and the desire to experiment. Do they, the novel asks, find themselves in paradise or a kind of hell in which all previous moral absolutes have gone ?

The 8 or 9 couples live close-knit lives, sharing holidays, parties, school runs and frequently, sexual partners. Their master of ceremonies, the odious dentist Freddie, encourages this sexual freedom in which he takes virtually no part. Piet Hanema, the central male character, is an inveterate womaniser and interestingly, the only non-academic in the group, he is a carpenter. He also remains friends with all his previous partners as he is attractive and undemanding. His transgressive relationship with the heavily pregnant Foxy Whitworth causes deep rifts and disquiet in the group. Hedonistic freedom comes, Updike makes it clear, with a heavy price and Piet and Foxy pay.

The writing is wonderful. Updike at his clear, passionate and insightful best leads us deep into the lives of his characters through his way of writing from the inside out. We feel, see and experience life as lived by those characters in that time and place.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike has become most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery". A subject which, he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." There is no sign of exhaustion in this early novel though, He writes honestly, with fire in his belly and out of anger, deep disgust as well as a desire to explain and to understand.


"He'll get by without his rabbit pie ... run, rabbit, run rabbit, run run run ...", 13 Aug 2008
'Rabbit, Run' is the first in a quartet of novels by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist that revolve around the varying fortunes of a former high school Basketball champion Rabbit Angstrom. All four novels were written at the end of the a decade and published at the beginning of the next, and give a subjective flavour of modern American life as lived in small-town mediocrity. Angstrom observes the rapid transformations of the late 1950s here, and later the 60s (Rabbit Redux), 70s (Rabbit is Rich) and 80s (Rabbit at Rest), but is rather buffeted by them, lucid but always overwhelmed.

Updike makes it clear in his fascinating afterword that Rabbit "was for me a way in - a ticket to America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, thought the difference is often slight". Thus there is an exploratory unruliness to Updike's writing, an anything-goes, that enables the writer to abandon his lofty authorial seat and rove around, eyes wide open. It's a seedy, cynical novel with few really likeable characters. Visceral and provocative, it rarely shirks from a rather dank explicitness that belies it's early 1960s first publication (although, in fact, a number of forced original cuts have been reinstated here).

Despite the need to chronical the life and times Updike consciously avoids the bigger contemporaneous themes, but concentrates on what is lived and felt by ordinary people of the period. He delves with stealth, and without ceremony, into the perspective of a number of other characters, often in rambling stream-of-consciousness. One almost unpunctuated chapter depicts Rabbit's wife losing control in drunkedness and accidently drowning her baby. It's brutal and horrific, more so as the brakes are taken off the writing, expediting Janice's decline into drunken madness.

It is the stylistic freedom Updike permits himself which makes his writing so penetrating. He panders to no formalistic strictures, and thus - like Rabbit Angstrom - runs with irresponsible abandon into new predicaments. "Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed", the author remarks in the afterword, "I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human". 'Rabbit, Run' makes no concessions to resolution, and it begins the quartet as it continued, with a sense of maddening, but very human, indecisiveness.

Updike also adds in the afterword that Rabbit, Run was in part a conscious reaction to Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', published a few years before, with its clarion call to break free from the constraints of conservative America. The book is an examination of "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behid get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties' fraying but still tight social weave". This is not to suggest Updike's novel is a cautionary note about the dangers of "cutting loose", but that it presents a bleakly unromantic alternative to the beat paradigm: that some people cannot extricate themselves from their lives cleanly or even satisfyingly. Certainly, there is nothing clean about Rabbit's escape, but a sense of bloody rupture suggested by his baby's premature death. "Boy, you really have the touch of death, don't you?", mocks Angstrom's prostitute mistress in the final chapter, and it is this morbid pallor that hangs inauspiciously over the whole novel. A vital, if dispiriting read.

rabbit run, 09 Apr 2008
this is the first book i have ever read of john updikes.i cant say i enjoyed reading this,but i dont think i was meant to. the main protagonist harry " rabbit" angstrom is probably the most self centred and morally repugnunt individual i have ever read about, but that is the beauty of this book.you feel yourself appalled at rabbits moral bankrupcy.
you forget that he is a fictional character.this is a beautifully written book.for all his faults i think i might end up reading the futher adventures of rabbit.he may be self centred,but he is an interesting read.

The dreariness of a 'second rate' suburban existence..., 01 Mar 2007
This book tells the story of the once great college sportsman Harry 'rabbit' Angstrom, who at the age of twenty six has made nothing of his former talent and feels trapped in a loveless marriage, to an alcoholic wife who is unable to keep their home and young son under control. Rabbit is stifled by his dreary suburban existence and cannot escape the feeling that having once been a 'first rate' sportsman, being second rate just doesnt cut it. Unable to accept his life as it is, Harry walks out on his wife and child and begins a complicated journey to rid himself of his dull existence. Along the way, meeting his one time sports coach Mr. Tothero and striking up an odd friendship with a priest.

The book explores the suburban experience of an outsider, one who cannot conform to the life he has become tangled up in. In much the same manner as writers like John Cheever and Richard Yates, this book explores the disasterous effects of characters whose expectations of life have been seriously diminished.

This book is really well written and has a clear narrative voice, while the reader may not agree with Harry's actions, we cannot help but become immersed in his world. This book is the first of four 'Rabbit' books which follow Harry throughout his life, but also acts as a great introduction to Updike. Highly recommended!

Rabbit, Run - John Updike, 04 Sep 2006
Many good writers can tell an engrossing story, but only the best manage to reach inside your head and grasp perceptions that you yourself had never acknowledged but instantly recognise, shudder or smile at, and empathise with when you read. Suddenly you are there with the characters, experiencing everything they see, feel, hear, smell, taste and touch, every twinge, every furrowed brow and fleeting thought. John Updike is one of those masters and many of his descriptions stay in your head forever. I can't look at rhododendrons without remembering his description of them in Rabbit, Run - 'when the first blooms came, they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the side of their heads...but when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds, they remind him of...the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter'.
All the Rabbit books are beautifully written. Rabbit's indecisiveness, his angst and discontent, are painted with an incredibly masterly touch, as are his effects on those around him. Updike captures not only characters but the whole human predicament. His insights are second to none - with a few well chosen words he can nail a feeling, thought or action where other lesser authors would struggle and use ten times as many less suitable words.
My only slight disappointment about Updike is that many of his characters are so stereotypically 'male'. They are able to fall out of love when their wives fall into depressed alcoholism, their hair thins, they lose interest in sex, or they become overweight, able to walk out on partners and kids without seeing to miss them, or with only a flicker of self-indulgent angst. But Updike's ability to synthesise people of all sorts is evident from his descriptions of peripheral characters, in particular, females, so his cynicism about the male race is not due to shallowness but a perhaps realistic perception of the superficiality and/or flaws of some men and women. A writer, then, not of cosy tales and romantic dreams, but of life in all its grit and truth, good, bad, ugly and funny. The man is a genius.




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soooo good!, 20 Oct 2005
In describing postwar America of the 1950s, many historians evoke images of the mundane: the organization man, the gray-flannel suit, mass exodus to suburbia, proliferation of television sets into middle-class households, and the sterility of "Leave it to Beaver" family life, all illustrating stagnation and complacency. Along with conformity, this almost involuntary collectivism brings alienation of the individual to a society of insecure citizens, who seem to constantly exchange sidelong glances with each other in search of cultural affirmation. Both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) exemplify vain struggles to assert individual identities in mid-century American culture. Updike successfully illustrates the introspective struggle of the "silent majority" through Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the ambivalent non-hero of Rabbit, Run. Through themes of religion, physical action, and responsibility, John Updike suggests the stuffiness, disillusionment, and ambivalence pervasive in 1950s American life struggling to cope with a conformist postwar identity. One of the most prominent themes of Rabbit, Run is religious duplicity and a fundamental questioning of Christianity. This ambivalence is manifest through the rather ineffective Episcopalian minister, Jack Eccles, who exists as a collage of religious dogma, having taking his own muddled path of Protestantism away from that of his father and grandfather, also ministers. Eccles seems much more effective as a social worker than a minister, traveling around from house to house hoping to reconstruct Harry Angstrom's rubble of a nuclear family. He receives a rather severe reprimand from his colleague, Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach who labels Eccles a "minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf" (154). As a result, even the most significant figure of religious guidance in the community seems confused about his social role. Updike continues to discredit religious faith in Rabbit's perception of the church. Early on, he admits to Ruth Leonard, his part time prostitute lover, that he does believe in some divine force, but immediately wonders if he is lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement...their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of an unseen world. (81) Angstrom acknowledges the existence of a higher authority, but seems confused about its source or location. Later he observes the crowds filing into Eccles' parish, "even the plainest walk...glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief" (214). Though he questions Christian imposition of mores and standards on modern society, Angstrom still holds a fundamental appreciation and respect for the sacrosanct belief "in something." Several times Harry Angstrom experiences quasi-existentialist epiphanies, once on the golf course with his minister friend: Very simply he brings the club head around his shoulder into [the ball]. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. [...] It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes his hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. "That's it!" (121). In this figurative leap of faith, he discovers clear evidence of a God-like existence. Harry consistently reveals his belief in something resembling religious experience throughout the novel, though he rather bluntly rejects the traditional values of a Christian society. He oscillates between religious disillusionment and a somewhat curious acknowledgment of a higher power, but he never really develops any concrete idea or definition to explain his emotional phenomenon. Rather he offers only an ability to identify the feeling. Rabbit's religious confusion speaks to a larger community of skeptical believers, those generally experiencing a similar middle-class nonexistence as the main character. His spiritual restlessness subverts blind acceptance of Christianity as America's faith. Another dominant theme of Rabbit, Run lies in the exhilaration of physical perfection. Rabbit lives for the adrenalized intensity of physical and emotional climax, through his past basketball career, the perfect golf shot, or sexual dominance over his female counterparts. Intertwined with his religious disillusionment, the idea of physical perfection provides Rabbit with evidence of a greater existence above his mundane occupation as a MagiPeel salesman in suburban Brewer, Pennsylvania. He revels in his past success as a star basketball player, elated "that his touch still lives in his hands," a physical liberation from his "long gloom" of conventional life since high school glory days (3). Adulterous sexual activity provides the animalistic Rabbit with his other major physical release, though it ultimately leads to dejection as he reproduces at the rate of his namesake, impregnating both his wife, Janice, and his lover, Ruth. Even at sexual climax, Ruth envisions the transparent nature of Rabbit's urges, "as if she knows that as that moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair" (77). The past glory of his basketball career, the fluke shot of an epiphanic golf drive, and the ultimate denial of his natural virility constantly push Harry to search for an ultimate, indefinable truth. Finally, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom expresses frustration in his denial of conventional responsibility. The images of running thread a circular loop through the narrative, from his initial drive to West Virginia at the beginning to his rather inconclusive, desperate attempt to "travel to the next patch of snow" (280). He runs away from his responsibility to his wife, his children, his lover, and Walt Disney's total merchandising of Disneyland on network television. Even in his physical self-removal to West Virginia, Harry meets an alien world: "He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America?" (29) Harry's urge to run symbolizes the introspective dissatisfaction with American institutions, a rebellion against expectations, but one lacking a clear purpose and goal. Rabbit is Odysseus traveling to Ithaca, but without a map to guide his way. In his novel Rabbit, Run, John Updike explores themes of religion, perfection, and responsibility to illustrate the claustrophobia and ambivalence of an average American in the 1950s. Both Updike and Ellison point to the invisibility of the citizen, the disillusionment of individuality in a post-industrial age. What Updike refuses to offer is an ultimate solution to the problem, treating the platitudes of basketball Coach Tothero and Mickey Mouse television advice with a parodic contempt, refusing to accept the paradigms as cohesive solutions to social problems. Updike never suggests a solution to the protagonist's ailment, but demonstrates an indifferent acceptance of roles and responsibility through antagonists to Rabbit's eternal quest for personal freedom. Ultimately, Updike paints the portrait of a man searching for dignity in his possession of freedom, in his possession of the American life. Unable to find it, he runs in disgust.

Unrelenting ugliness , 21 Feb 2008
I read this trilogy about 4 years ago and found Rabbit to be a bleak characther. This impression has not left me; if anything, the years have compounded my initial feeling about the books. This trilogy is a study of a life fenced in on itself, a life dead to beauty and sunk in the ugliness of self absorption.

Updike- the Rabbit books, 04 Sep 2006
Many good writers can tell an engrossing story, but only the best manage to reach inside your head and grasp perceptions that you yourself had never acknowledged but instantly recognise, shudder or smile at, and empathise with when you read. Suddenly you are there with the characters, experiencing everything they see, feel, hear, smell, taste and touch, every twinge, every furrowed brow and fleeting thought. John Updike is one of those masters and many of his descriptions stay in your head forever. I can't look at rhododendrons without remembering his description of them in Rabbit, Run - 'when the first blooms came, they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the side of their heads...but when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds, they remind him of...the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter'.
All th Rabbit books are beautifully written. Rabbit's indecisiveness, his angst and discontent, are painted with an incredibly masterly touch, as are his effects on those around him. Updike captures not only characters but the whole human predicament. His insights are second to none - with a few well chosen words he can nail a feeling, thought or action where other lesser authors would struggle and use ten times as many less suitable words.
My only slight disappointment about Updike is that many of his characters are so stereotypically 'male'. They are able to fall out of love when their wives fall into depressed alcoholism, their hair thins, they lose interest in sex, or they become overweight, able to walk out on partners and kids without seeing to miss them, or with only a flicker of self-indulgent angst. But Updike's ability to synthesise people of all sorts is evident from his descriptions of peripheral characters, in particular, females, so his cynicism about the male race is not due to shallowness but a perhaps realistic perception of the superficiality and/or flaws of some men and women. A writer, then, not of cosy tales and romantic dreams, but of life in all its grit and truth, god, bad, ugly and funny. The man is a genius.

If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 08 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!

A disappointment, 08 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.

I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.

In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too. <