Word: alexandra
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...time is the late 1960s and the setting an imaginary but vividly realized village on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Experiencing "blossoming self-hood," three women divorce their husbands, tug their children into the vortex of downward economic mobility and take up careers. Alexandra Spofford makes clay figurines, Jane Smart plays the cello, and Sukie Rougemont writes a gossip column for the local paper. These friends meet almost every Thursday, as a coven of genuine, practicing witches: "In the right mood and into their third drinks they could erect a cone of power above them like a tent...
Things begin to turn nasty once the mysterious Darryl Van Home has settled in at one of Eastwick's eeriest old houses. Updike drops devilishly loud hints about who Van Home really is. Alexandra thinks of him as the "dark prince" and recognizes "his diabolical arts." When the witches join him in his oversize steamy teak tub for the first of a series of baths and orgies, Darryl asks, "You kids think this is hot? I set the thermostat 20° higher when it's just...
They are randomly promiscuous: "Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties." Although they cast spells over their ex-husbands that reduced all three to inert household objects, their witchcraft is ordinarily mischievous rather than malign. When Alexandra wants to walk her dog on the beach without a leash, she simply conjures up a thunderstorm to drive bathers away...
...with Mark's proclivity for controversial business deals and driving fast sports cars, a Fortson heiress should be a stabilizing, not to say supportive, influence. After church, at a gala lunch, with guests including Japan's Prince Hiro (now at Oxford) and Britain's Princess Alexandra, one can imagine that there was more than a single set of crossed fingers under the table...
...anymore, not in the latter half of the 20th century, not in the United States of America, and certainly not in the suburbs." But of course they do, as Journalist and Novelist Frank Deford piercingly recounts in this spare and vivid eulogy to his daughter Alexandra, "Alex," who died in 1980 of cystic fibrosis...