Appointment in Eastwick

John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick has its comic moments but the shadow of the grim reaper hangs over it. “We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us,” notes one of the widows bleakly and as it turns out, prophetically. Jane is one of the three of women whose history continues after the long hiatus since Updike introduced them in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Her story ends this time around, but Sukie and Alexandra live on. At the novel’s end the narrative voice—the collective voice of Eastwick, the chorus as it were—primly rejoices that the three “unholy wantons” have once again left. It regrets, however, that they seem to have shed the guilt of their former sins—recounted in the first novel—“as casually as when they shed their clothes.” Yet time beats for the two survivors just as surely as it did for Jane, and in the face of death, what does a little guilt matter—we’re all guilty of something. The nature of the women’s’ witch hood—were they really witches and what did Updike mean by it?—that hung over the first novel seems a side issue this time. Like the frightened man in Somerset Maugham’s re-telling of the tale of the servant who flees to Samarra to avoid death only to find him there, these three women return to Eastwick not only to re-live their past, but to prolong their lives by re-discovering their younger selves. In a sense they do find the past, or the fragments of it that exist in the rather sad New England village that Eastwick has become, but it fails to revive them.
As always, Updike writes like an angel yet there were moments when my attention wandered. In the first part of the novel the women do some traveling, including to Egypt and China. The sections read as if Updike had dug out his old itineraries and incorporated his characters into them—I’ve been both places and I could almost have done the same myself. I could not, however, have re-created tired old Eastwick as he does, or the scene in which the three attempt to summon up their supernatural powers once again, complete with a circle dribbled onto the carpet with dishwasher soap. Nor could I have near to creating the immanence of death that pervades the novel—the sudden sharp reminders that this is Updike’s subject. As one of the women says, “Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.” That’s us, dear readers, standing in front of the firing squad with our eyes tight shut.