Word: eastwicks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WITCHES OF EASTWICK by John Updike. Satanism, feminism and revenge are the volatile ingredients in this witty fantasy set in contemporary New England...
...WITH a certain mixture of dread and excitement that one finds John Updike undertaking the material of magic and witcheraft in his latest novel. The Witches of Eastwick. Updike is a terrific writer, this book should because for excitement. But he is also innocent of magic; in the way that one's marden great aunt is probably innocent of sex: one dreads his first chapter as one avoids bringing up procreation with auntie...
...only morally attractive character in the book. Jenny Gabriel, dies by becoming food, literally by being eaten by cancer, a practical virtue seems to have no place in Updike's Eastwick. Jenny is summed up and dismissed by a witch who says: "I guess she was one of those perfectly lovely people the world for some reason never finds...
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...
...thinks like the piggiest of male chauvinists. Lunching with Sukie, Van Home feels "a surge of possessive pride in her beauty, her vital spirit. His. His toy." He runs them through some bizarre and degrading sexual hoops, but the playthings adore "our dear Darryl. Our leader. Our redeemer from Eastwick ennui." His ample house gives their new-found senses of identity room to burgeon: "In Van Home's realm they left their children behind and became children themselves." This is where the action is, Sukie muses, "not here in town, where bitter water lapped the pilings and placed...