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That sentence alone should tip off seasoned Updike readers as to where the author's sympathies lie, but even newcomers might easily guess that the good guys are supposed to be the Christians. The witches grow ever less sympathetic. References to their "starved children," untrimmed hedges, unmowed lawns and deteriorating houses proliferate; witchcraft is evidently hell on property values. Worse follows when Darryl performs a typically dumb male stunt and marries a younger woman. His "devotees" are outraged. They secure some hair clippings, mix them into a waxen image and call down the curse of cancer. Their victim is the Other Woman.
The Witches of Eastwick manifests most of Updike's virtues; it is witty, ironic, engrossing and punctuated by transports of spectacular prose. The witchcraft scenes are oddly convincing, thanks to their grounding in everyday details. A dog, for example, can sense his mistress's magic by its smell: "A tiny burnt odor like a gas jet when first turned on." But full enjoyment of the novel depends, at Updike's insistence, on some curious beliefs about the real world. First: women who renounce the nurturing and domestic arts will invariably channel their dark creative energies toward evil (the divorcee who manages to feed her children and keep her residence tidy and lead an independent life is not a permissible character in the closed microcosm of Eastwick.) A corollary is asserted by the plot's closing permutations: what every liberated woman wants most of all is another husband.
One need not be a committed feminist to find these claims questionable, to say the least. Writing such a sophisticated locker-room joke in the current ideological climate proves Updike a daring and possibly foolhardy fellow. He should probably now make sure that all of his whiskers wash down the drain each morning; fingernails ought to be trimmed behind bolted doors. As he himself notes, "Witchcraft, once engendered in a community, has a way of running wild, out of control of those who have called it into being, running so freely as to confound victim and victimizer.'' —By Paul Gray
Excerpt
"Certainly the fact of witchcraft hung in the consciousness of Eastwick; a lump, a cloudy density generated by a thousand translucent overlays, a sort of heavenly body, it was rarely breathed of and, though dreadful, offered the consolation of completeness, of rounding out the picture, like the gas mains underneath Oak Street and the television aerials scraping Kojak and Pepsi commercials out of the sky. . . for years after the events gropingly and even reluctantly related here, the rumor of witchcraft stained this corner of Rhode Island, so that a prickliness of embarrassment and unease entered the atmosphere with the most innocent mention of Eastwick."