The witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

Paper Book, 1984

Status

Available

Call number

Fiction Updike

Barcode

11025

Series

The Eastwick Novels (1)

Genres

Publication

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1984.

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML: �John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.��The New York Times Book Review Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorc�es with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick�and through the even darker fantasies of the town�s collective psyche. �A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.��The Philadelphia Inquirer �Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.��Newsday.… (more)

Media reviews

New York Times

Mr. Updike takes ''sisterhood is powerful'' at its word and imagines it literally. What if sisterhood really is powerful? What will the sisters use their ''powers'' for? And what - given human nature, of which Mr. Updike takes not too bright a view - what then? Luckily these witches are only

interested in the ''personal,'' rather than the ''political''; otherwise they might have done something unfrivolous, like inventing the hydrogen bomb.... ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is an excursion rather than a destination. Like its characters, it indulges in metamorphoses, reading at one moment like Kierkegaard, at the next like Swift's ''Modest Proposal,'' and at the next like Archie comics, with some John Keats thrown in. This quirkiness is part of its charm, for, despite everything, charming it is. As for the witches themselves, there's a strong suggestion that they are products of Eastwick's - read America's - own fantasy life.

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