THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK by John Updike; Knopf; 336 pages; $15.95
Over the years some critics have charged that Author John Updike consistently slights his fictional females, making them interesting only insofar as they arouse or comfort men. Updike's eleventh novel does not seem designed to appease his accusers; indeed, it looks a lot like a gauntlet flung down at feminism. Readers should get ready for a particularly hot summer. Some of the squawking at beaches will be coming not from seagulls but from liberated ladies and gents who are reading The Witches of Eastwick.
The 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 to the zenith."
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.
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 me."
It does not bother the three women that their satanic host acts and 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 a shudder of reflected light upon the haggard faces of the citizens of Eastwick as they plodded through their civic and Christian duties."