The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

On the face of it, a sequel to John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick is a promising idea. Given that his 1984 fantasia provided a lively gloss on the bacchanalian forces let loose by the 1960s, it stands to reason that revisiting his three suburban witches could provide readers with a snapshot of where America has gone in the decades since Alexandra, Jane and Sukie turned their quiet Rhode Island town upside down.

As its title suggests, The Widows of Eastwick, set in the early years of the new millennium, finds its heroines newly released from matrimonial bonds by the deaths of their second husbands. Alexandra, at 74 the eldest of the group, is living in New Mexico, having recently planted her estimable if somewhat dull potter husband in the desert earth. Jane, the threesome’s firebrand, is living in a large house in Boston with her 104-year-old mother-in-law after the loss of her spouse, a stuffy antiquarian dealer. And Sukie, the youngest of the group, has just escaped “the tidy Connecticut satellite city where she had been a second wife and where 30 years had gone by like a game of Pretend”.

The novel opens with Alexandra indulging in the time-honoured privilege of many American widows – the package tour. Her first excursion is a trip to Canada, where, after discovering that “totem poles and moose had a basic boringness”, she feels herself “trapped in an attic full of stuffed animals”. After reestablishing contact, she and Jane take an Egyptian holiday, where they indulge in a little of the old black magic during a midnight cruise on the Nile. Sukie then joins them for a trip to China, where they playfully cause Mao’s corpse to wink as they file through his mausoleum.

Jane and Sukie then propose to summer in Eastwick, “the scene of our primes”, to recapture some of that old black magic. Alexandra is dubious, though she eventually justifies a return by seeing it as an attempt to perform expiation for their slaying of young Jenny Gabriel, the favourite of their former coven master Darryl Van Horne. “Healing,” she explains to her sisters when pressed about why she has agreed to come, “and undoing whatever wrong we did here.”

After renting Van Horne’s old mansion (alas, the old devil is nowhere in sight in this book), they start to reintegrate into their old community, only to find it considerably less amenable to sorcery than when they fled. Sukie has a chance encounter with an old lover, now turned decrepit and undesirable; Alexandra bumps into the widow of one of her old flames, who asks her to conjure a spell to help her daughter conceive. The novel springs to life with the arrival of Christopher Gabriel, Jenny’s effete younger brother and Van Horne’s one-time protégé. Using powers learnt from his old master, he begins to exact revenge on his sister’s tormentors. Although the ensuing duel is not without casualties, the novel concludes on a positive note, with another junket in the offing.

The Widows of Eastwick is a singularly unsuccessful effort. In fact, it is difficult to see the point of the novel at all. Given the feebleness of the magic that they are able to conjure up, Updike’s three heroines might as well have been estate agents. While the book’s predecessor bristled with wicked action, here almost nothing happens. There is a perfunctory, clichéd feel to those early holidays – at one point Alexandra even remarks that the Great Wall “is the only work of Man that could be seen by observers on the moon”.

Enervating nostalgia permeates the novel’s Eastwick chapters – it is as if everyone wishes they were back in the prequel, where all the fun is. Storylines are established only to be allowed to peter out without resolution: at one point, Sukie develops a crush on a female Unitarian pastor, raising the prospect of a lesbian affair between a witch and an ordained minister. But Updike loses interest in the whole matter soon after it is mooted. Even less inspired is his depiction of the showdown between Christopher and the witches, a battle whose climax is surprising only because it is so implausible.

Near the book’s end, Alexandra’s frumpy daughter Marcy, who never left Eastwick, criticises her mother for trying to relive the past. “You’re disappointed,” she tells Alexandra. “The magic you thought would happen hasn’t.” She could just as easily have been speaking to the reader.

The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp320