Coming Of Age In Maycomb, Alabama Edition

To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

If I had to choose 5 books that not only represents the canon of American literature—while also defining what America is for someone who only had a remedial knowledge of our country—To Kill A Mockingbird easily cracks that list for me.^[1] It might be the perfect American novel, not because it was groundbreaking or because Harper Lee’s prose outshines everyone before and after her. It’s the perfect American novel because of Atticus Finch—the classic Ideal Man—and Scout Finch—a wonderful character that mirrors social metamorphosis perfectly.

I usually give no weight to all-time lists of any sort when it comes to movies but a few years ago the American Film Institute had their 50 greatest heroes list and Atticus Finch was number one, beating out a myriad of heroes that either required weapons (Indiana Jones, James Bond), or became significantly larger than life within their story (Rocky Balboa, Jefferson Smith).

This is not an accident.

Atticus Finch, I think, is one of the few characters in American literature (and cinema) that everyone wishes they could be on a certain level. We wish that we had his stoicism and unimpeded objectivity. We wish that we would do the right thing more often. The best thing about the novel—the thing that makes it so identifiable to generations of people—is that Harper Lee thoroughly humanizes Atticus Finch. He is entirely relatable, regardless if you grew up in the ’30′s or ten years ago. He is not overly idealized to a fault, or more metaphor than character (see: John Galt).

To me, one of the greatest scenes in the book is when Atticus and the kids stay at Jack’s house. (Jack is Atticus’s brother.) Atticus and Jack are talking about the trial of Tom Robinson and Atticus’s fears of what the aftermath might bring to his family:

“‘[...] But do you think I could face my children otherwise? You know what’s going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb’s usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand… I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me enough… Jean Louise?’

“My scalp jumped. I stuck my head around the corner. ‘Sir?’

“‘Go to bed.’

“I scurried to my room and went to bed. [...] But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.”

This passage perfectly displays not only the relationship between a father and his daughter, but also the very essence of both: Atticus and his instinctive nature to protect his family, and Scout and her wonderful naivete that acts as the lens by which we see the story unfold. Finally, the fact that the book is written from the perspective of Scout as an adult providing us with a story from her childhood makes the last half of the last sentence from the above passage all the more flawless.

Before I delve any further into this review, here is a summary of the book (in case you have forgotten, or are one of the few people who weren’t required to read it in high school). To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Maycomb, Alabama in the early 1930′s. It follows the Finch’s (Atticus, Jem, and Scout, and their maid Calpurnia; the kids’ mother died when they were young) up until 1936, the year in which the trial of Tom Robinson—a black man accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell—took place and in which Mayella’s father Bob tried to take revenge on Atticus for defending a black man. Before the trial starts, the book is primarily about Jem and Scout and their interactions and experiences with people ranging from the enigmatic (the unseen, walking rumor mill, specter of a man, Boo Radley) to the walks-of-life characters like their summertime friend Dill and other characters like Miss Maudie and Aunt Alexandra.

The trial is the turning point of the book for obvious reasons: even though Scout and Jem are 10 and 14 respectively, the trial’s verdict and aftermath provide Lee with enough to explore themes involving death of innocence, gender roles, and a questioning of how certain wrongs can exist in a society that holds freedom and humanity as default values.

Mark Twain realized many decades previously that the best way to handle race is to put a child square in the middle of it, and let them be the lens by which adults are forced to look at things, and Harper Lee with this book does a job on par with Twain in this respect. When Atticus sits in front of the jail by himself at night to ensure that no one attempts to get to Tom Robinson, Lee inserts Jem and Scout directly into the scene. The kids are the ones who cause the five men who have arrived to get Tom to turn back around. The men can’t bear to bust in, not when children are looking at them in the face and asking why they are here. And in the hands of a lesser writer this scene would probably have been too ham-fisted or possibly even grossly preachy, but Harper Lee wrote it in such a way that felt real because Scout’s voice was already so wonderful and so textured that we as readers knew that the men were probably not going to hurt Atticus and his children. But what was unexpected about it was its matter-of-factness. Were they going to hurt you, Atticus? the children wondered. No, they just wanted to scare me; these men, they might’ve been acting differently tonight but in the morning they’ll still be the same good people. You can’t damn people who become temporarily misguided, Atticus explains.

I read this book in sophomore year English class and I liked it a lot. I had planned on re-reading it again a couple times previous to this but each time I found another book that caught my eye. Going into this reading I knew that I would probably still like it, that it would still resonate with me. But I was really surprised with how much I unequivocally love this book. Which leads me to a few words about Harper Lee.

To Kill A Mockingbird is the only book that she ever published. Like J.D. Salinger, she became a recluse (how many people know that she is still alive?) and as she got older she refused to talk about the book even if she allowed someone to speak with her. It is truly unbelievable that not only was Lee’s first book a huge success (it won the Pulitzer, as well as it being a point of reference during the Civil Rights era) but it was also remade into a perfect and iconic movie.^[2]

Has the success of Mockingbird provided more negatives than positives for Harper Lee? Why won’t she talk about the book? Did Truman Capote (Lee’s childhood friend and basis for the character Dill) help write the novel? I don’t know any of those answers. And the fact is that when Harper Lee dies, none of that will really matter. She left us one gift—a timeless, socially relevant gift—and we will always have it to use as a basis to better explain (and learn from) a particular era of American history.

[1] The other four books (in no particular order): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Rounding out the top 10 would be (again, in no particular order): The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and flip a coin between The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

[2] I think the only major thing left out from the book in the movie is Atticus hinting at incest during his cross-examination of Mayella. Other than that, the movie is practically a carbon copy of the book.

____________________

[Note: the next book to be reviewed will be Columbine by Dave Cullen, quite possibly the most comprehensive book written about the school shooting in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. Cullen's article "The Depressive and the Psychopath," written in 2004 for Slate on the 5-year anniversary of the shooting, is a seminal article about the shooting and why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried it out. It can be found here.]

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

Gonna try something new this month. Instead of reading a book (in this case, The Corrections) then writing about it solo like I have the previously, I am going to team up with my friend Chuck Kennedy. We are both going to start The Corrections at the same time and then every 100 pages or so we are going to add our thoughts/criticisms on the comments section of this post. Feel free to join in, or you can simply watch the back-and-forth between us unfold; either way, click on the comments icon to the left of the title of this post to view—or add to—the conversation.

Summary of the novel from the publisher: After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

I went into this year with a New Year’s reading resolution: I was going to make it a point to primarily read fiction from the last decade. I started out by reading Susan Gregg Gilmore’s Looking For Salvation At The Dairy Queen, which is a book I would recommend for summer reading. The narrator’s voice is good, it is light and breezy, and reads like a book that would make for a good movie if put in the hands of a caring director and producers who are faithful to the tone of the book. (So why didn’t I write a review of this book here? I never found the time to do so. It’s a bad excuse, I know, but it’s the truth too.) I then proceeded to tackle The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was the previous book to be reviewed here. Next up on the fiction-of-the-’00′s theme is Never Let Me Go, the unsuspecting (and almost disguised) sci-fi novel from Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005.

[Before I get into the meat of my criticism of this book, let me just say that this book is written in first-person narrative, and that, for me, first-person narrative is a tricky proposition because it becomes that much harder for me to warm up to the narrator. Personally, I think it is harder to love a first-person narrator, and, conversely, it is easier to love a third-person narrator. First-person by default allows for certain traps to be uncovered easily; a third-person narrative can conceal almost everything and still be engrossing. Again, these are just my opinions and tastes regarding the two styles.]

Never Let Me Go is written in first-person by Kathy, a carer who went to a school called Hailsham in Britain. From the sound of it early on Hailsham seems akin to an Ivy League school: its prestige can also create an image of elitism to people who are not alumni. Hailsham’s main purpose as a school seems to be its ability to churn out carers—a kind of nurse that comforts and takes care of people who donate organs and body parts.

The first half of the book revolves around Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy, at Hailsham; the second half revolving mostly around the three of them at a post-Hailsham place called The Cottages. The second half of the book is also where the book’s central story unfolds itself in earnest: you find out that the students of Hailsham are actually clones, essentially created to be organ donors for human beings later on down the line. Additionally, you find out that Hailsham was established with the goal of showing society that the clones—the students—had true human qualities and something akin to a soul. All throughout their time at Hailsham, a couple of times a year an older woman simply named Madame would come to the school and take art that the students had produced. None of them ever knew why she did it or what it meant. It turns out that the art was taken and brought to exhibitions as a means of proving that the clones had a sense of curiosity, creativity, and artfulness.

On the whole Never Let Me Go is written very well but I found the overall story to simply be kind of uninteresting. I felt as though I got to know Kathy pretty well—the first-person narration here is strong, which is a good thing—but I never found her story to be enthralling. I will, however, concede that two parts of the book were quite brilliant:

1) the idea that the clones seem to inherently believe that their human counterparts are hookers, strippers, and drug dealers. Once they move to the Cottages Kathy begins to dabble in casual sex, which isn’t terribly unusual especially if you think of the Cottages as a metaphor for college. Except that whenever Kathy has sex she feels a palpable desire to have sex right now, almost like a low-level, abstract nymphomania, which causes her to believe temporarily that she must have been copied from a prostitute and that this sexual desire is residual from the cloning process. I thought that this was a great metaphor for a particular type of confusion that afflicts most everyone as young adults: a confusion born of sexual freedom that makes you question why you are having sex with the people that you are. It is also a confusion that seems very female-centric, as casual hookups seem to cause women to question themselves more than men do.

2) the part about the porn magazines at the Cottages. Midway through the book there is a brief passage about a former student named Steve and the only thing anyone remembered or knew about him was that he had a soft-core pornography collection. Subsequently, any time a porn magazine was discovered, everyone would a) say something to the effect of “here’s another of Steve’s magazines” and b) pretend to be bored and annoyed by their presence. And, yet, no one ever threw them out and whenever someone found one of them they would disappear for about 30 minutes. Of all the many ways it could have been written that the clones and humans were linked together behaviorally I kind of love that Ishiguro decided to write that the clones were just as naturally susceptible as we humans are to playing weird social roles amongst friends and strangers (as opposed to safe things like “they both can feel pain” or “they both yearn to fall in love”).

All in all, though, Never Let Me Go just didn’t do it for me. If you really like first-person narratives and English writing and low-level sci-fi you may like it a lot more than I did. I found the story to be kind of dull and therefore would not recommend it to anyone looking for some general reading to submerse themselves in.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon

“Forget about what you are escaping from [...] Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.“

The above quote is so central to Michael Chabon’s (pronounced SHAY-bahn, in case you’re wondering) masterful and thoroughly wonderful, Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This 630+ page novel which, on the surface, is about comic books and Jewish mythology is really about escape—whether it be about escaping from Prague before the Nazis begin their march into control of the city, or the escape from your true self so that you can establish a temporary normalcy, or the escape that so many kids took part in with their comics during and after WWII. I have never read a piece of fiction that deals so magnificently with escape (and doesn’t take place in an all-out fantasy setting).

On the surface, a novel that uses comic books as a way to expand on the themes of escape, of love, of identity—you would be justified in fearing that this book could succumb to a disease of clichés and repetition. One might worry that the comics are used in a manner we are already familiar with: that the superheroes represent virtue and a quest for justice, that the villains are metaphors for daily evils and compromises, that the sidekick represents the idea that a friend is invaluable, etc. What Chabon so brilliantly does here instead is seamlessly lays the world of comic books onto an already established linear story. The idea of comics snaps on to the story, rather than the other way around. And, yes, you do have your clichéd bits about comics here but they are written and handled perfectly. (Considering that Hollywood is going to suck every last drop of blood out of the comics industry by releasing comics-based movie until 2023, let’s just say that it was refreshing to read something about comics and marvel at how well it was handled.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a story about Joe (Josef) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (née Klayman)—two cousins who are suddenly thrown together when Josef arrives at Sammy’s house one day after fleeing from Prague when the writing was on the walls regarding Hitler’s desire to take over Europe. Sammy is fatherless and mostly friendless; he spends most of his free time reading comics or writing. Sammy is stationary, but would love to go all over the place (his father was an entertainer on the Vaudeville circuit and ultimately chose that over his family). By the time he arrives in New York, Joe has gone many places and done many things that a typical teenage boy probably shouldn’t have to go to or do.

Joe grew up being amazed by the life (and idea) of Harry Houdini. He would eventually become friends Bernard Kornblum, a well-respected elder of the magician/escapist/entertainer world. Kornblum taught Joe how to pick locks so as to escape from such setups like: having your arms chained behind your back while inside of a bag and thrown into a river. He was a mentor and when Joe started showing high proficiency in this field of work, it coincided at a time when Kornblum was asked to find the Golem of Prague and move it so that the Nazis would never find it or destroy it.

From here, the novel continues to explore many more levels on the theme of escape: Joe’s physical escape from Czechoslovakia; Sammy’s escape when dealing with his sexuality; Joe’s setting aside of money so that he can pay for his family to brought to the U.S., and the daydreams associated with that idea; the mental escapes that both Sammy and Joe have to perform in order to come up with characters and story lines for the comics they are creating; the physical escapes that Joe chooses to do during and after WWII.

Kavalier & Clay is a great, nuanced book (I haven’t even gotten to Rosa Saks, the woman who would play a role in Sammy’s and Joe’s lives) that treats its characters and story with real love. It is a book that mixes comedy, heartbreak, wonder, and defeat with ease. Here are two great excerpts that show Chabon’s impeccable writing ability. The first excerpt is a great example of wonder, as you’re reading the back story of Judy Dark, a.k.a. The Luna Moth (a female character based on Rosa Saks). Notice the depth of playfulness and movement, two cornerstones of any story in which a seemingly banal character becomes charged with a great power that can help save humanity:

“So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City—that dazzling town!—about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens in the summertime with paper lanterns. On this steely autumn afternoon, however, our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah. Tonight we are going down, under the ground, to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and the jackhammers, lower than the rats and the legendary alligators, lower even than the bones of Algonquins and dire wolves—to Office 99, a small, neat cubicle, airless and white, at the end of a corridor in the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits young Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. The nameplate on her desk so identifies her. She is a thin, pale thing, in a plain gray suit, and life is clearly passing her by. Twice a week a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper comes by her office to cart away the books that she has officially pronounced dead. Every ten minutes or so her walls are shaken by the thunder of the uptown local racing overhead.

“Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!”

The second excerpt illustrates the bluntness of heartbreak in the book when Joe finds out the ship (the Ark of Miriam) he was able to get his family on headed for the U.S. was sunk by the Nazis shortly after it left a port in Portugal. The first sentence here is what Rosa reads from a paper’s account of the sinking; the remainder of the excerpt is what really happened:

“[...] A German U-boat assigned to one of the dreaded ‘wolf packs’ that were tormenting Allied shipping in the Atlantic had set upon the innocent ship and sent it to the bottom with all hands.

“This account, it later developed, was not quite true. When, after the war, he was put on trials for other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Dönitz’s ‘Prize Regulations,’ he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land—the island of Corvo in the Azores—and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam. The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats so quickly that the crew of U-328 had no time to help. It was only luck that Halse and his crew of forty to escape with their own lives. If he had known that the ship carried children, Halse was asked, a good many of them unable to swim, would he still have proceeded with the attack? Halse’s reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow.

“‘They were children,’ he said. ‘We were wolves.’”

This is one of the best fiction books I have read, and it is one that everyone should read before they die.

The Witches Of Eastwick
by John Updike

The Witches Of Eastwick is my introduction to John Updike. (It was a coin toss between this and Rabbit, Run and Rabbit lost.) Without ever having read anything by Updike I knew that there was an aura about him that his critics loved to point out and it was that he was misogynistic. So I figured I would start off with a book that centers around women and see if that criticism about him was somewhat true or partially reactionary or unfounded (as much as can be gleaned from reading one book). I will get to that in a couple of minutes.

First, I must say that the fatal flaw in The Witches Of Eastwick is that it is uneven. The collective praise for Updike’s prose is grounded in reality because when he is on, he is capable of writing simply brilliant scenes with jaw-dropping ease. For example, this passage describing Jane Smart, the cello-playing witch:

“Jane Smart was practicing Bach’s Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, the little black sixteenth-notes of the prelude going up and down and then up again with the sharps and flats like a man slightly raising his voice in conversation, old Bach setting his infallible tonal suspense engine in operation again, and abruptly Jane began to resent it, these notes, so black and certain and masculine, the fingering getting trickier with each sliding transposition of the theme and he not caring, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt, or how her obedient spirit was pushed back and forth, up and down, by these military notes just to give him a voice after death, a bully’s immortality; abruptly she rebelled, put down the bow, poured herself a little dry vermouth, and went to the phone. Sukie would be back from work by now, throwing some peanut butter and jelly at her poor children before heading out to the evening’s idiotic civic meeting.”

This passage says so much about Jane Smart. Of the three witches, she is most prone to see things in the strictest of black and white as it pertains to men and their affairs with them, which in turn makes her very prone to lashing out. “Not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt.” “How her obedient spirit was pushed.” “Just to give him a voice after death.” “Abruptly she rebelled.” Another thing in this passage that is important to note is the reference to her children, and notice how little they comprise of it. This is important to note because all three witches are actually quite mean to their children–not out of pre-meditated malice but out of selfishness. All three witches have children but they are all almost entirely ignored by their mothers, women who are mostly occupied by having affairs with various men in their neighborhood and by their Thursday night dinners with each other. The children’s names are rarely ever mentioned, either in dialogue between the women, or in narration. Again, what this says about Updike’s view of women is something I will hold off expanding on until the end of this review.

But in between the great prose that arrives from time to time you essentially have a story that is kind of uninteresting. Furthermore, the ending is kind of maddening–not because it doesn’t make sense or anything like that–because what the witches do to Jenny is way too severe. And it does not make sense as to why Sukie and Alexandra are on board with Jane’s plan.

The Witches Of Eastwick follows the aforementioned Jane Smart along with Sukie Rougemont, and Alexandra Spofford in their small Rhode Island town during the early ’70′s. This coven has affairs with various married men in the town and their overall routine is suddenly interrupted when Darryl Van Horne moves into an old mansion in town. All three women have typically different reactions to this news–news that a single man with no family from Manhattan will be moving into their hamlet: Alexandra, the oldest woman of the group, has subconsciously grouped her own self-image problems that are caused by the inertia of age into putting up a facade that she is completely uninterested in getting to know him–so much so that she pretends to be angry over the thought of the new occupant disrupting the living conditions of the egrets that have been living on the long-abandoned property; Sukie, being that she is the town gossip by trade (she works at the local paper and writes a comings-and-goings type local color column) is naturally curious about discovering everything there is to know about Darryl; and Jane, who, as an artist, is initially offended when she hears that Darryl has numerous pianos that are being moved into the house (a kind of implied theme of Bohemianism vs. bourgeoisie).

Darryl is very rich and has an odd charm about him in so much as he is loud, hairy, and whenever he talks for longer than a few minutes he has to wipe away the spit that builds up at the ends of his lips. But like many men who are rich and exude confidence Darryl is able to attract women in spite of his flaws or annoyances. After meeting each of the women individually, he invites them all to his house–specifically, to join him in taking a bath in a bathroom that would have made Caligula blush. (Slate bathtub, exotic lights, marble accents, a control panel built in to the tub that controlled the lights and the stereo–things that would be seen as very cool nowadays, let alone over thirty years ago.) The four of them wind up having orgies in the bathroom on a regular basis. Things between Darryl and the coven are further complicated when one of the men that Sukie had had an affair with (Clyde Gabriel) kills his wife, then hangs himself.

After the murder-suicide is discovered, Clyde’s children come back home to Eastwick to take care of the affairs of their parents (organizing the house so that it can be sold, etc.). Jenny, who up until then was living in Chicago and working at Michael Reese Hospital, and Chris, who is your prototypical drifting, half-hearted, directionless guy, are eventually asked to Darryl’s place. Chris appears unimpressed with everything and is mostly a wallflower.

Darryl becomes interested in Jenny because of her experiences working in a lab and amongst doctors at the hospital. He employs Jenny to help him because one of his many side projects is that he is trying to make synthetic polymers and locating the interface (because he’s sure it exists) between solar and electrical energy and he believes she can be of use to him in this respect.

Eventually, to the dismay of the coven (“She stole him. She made fools of us,” Jane declares), Darryl marries Jenny and the witches–driven mostly by the will of Jane–combine their powers and give Jenny cancer. Jenny eventually dies due to the cancer, Darryl and Chris hook up and go back to New York, and the women each conjure up their own perfect man and leave town with them. And I will use this is as the basis for delving into the book’s use of sexuality, and what I gleaned of Updike’s view of women from its use.

First of all, it is very easy to glean some level of misogyny in the ending: the fact that when everything starts to fall apart with the witches, they each create a “perfect man” and leave with him. Obviously, on the surface, this does not look or feel modern. But the key, I think, lies with Jane Smart and her acting as kind of a microcosm of the sexual revolution from a purely male point of view. Jane is easily the most polarizing character in the book, especially from a female perspective. What I mean is: during the orgies, Jane is the only one who performs the sexual act of, um, swallowing with Darryl–the act that causes most women to use the ‘whore’ label the most. And because she does this there is definitely an air about her wherein she is expected to rank highest of the three on Darryl’s unofficial scale. And the fact that Jane is the one who is most adamant in punishing Jenny seems to reinforce this: Jane willingly performed the act that most women find disgusting and she received nothing in return.

Which leads me to the sexual revolution part of this analogy. Casual sex is immensely complicated–emotions are oftentimes checked and voices are mostly muted in exchange for very temporary freedom. Things are always boiling beneath the surface; nothing in casual sex comes for free (it is free in so much as someone is being used for free). Look at the sexual revolution of the ’60′s. It was freeing but it also complicated everything to the point of frustration (if not for the participants, then for their children) once it hit the mainstream. And by setting The Witches Of Eastwick in the early ’70′s and by having three women fall for one man, Updike tries to poke holes in the notion that women can act sexually like men to the point of actually trying to re-wire their nature. Does he succeed? Kind of. From the outside, the women look independent and confident, but they are still affected by Darryl’s decision to marry Jenny, and Sukie and Alexandra still go along with the plan to harm her in retaliation. Even when the women have their affairs they convince themselves that they are helping the men out because their wives are so unbearable.

(An aside: this is one of the things that I found fascinating as Sex And The City rolled into its last couple seasons–fans of the show (who were mostly women) found Samantha to be independent and Carrie to be the one that most women wanted to be like overall. Isn’t it ironic that the character that most women wished that they were more like, Carrie, was probably the most shallow of the four girls? She was co-dependent on Big, spent money recklessly, had the lowest amount of ambition compared to the other three women, and mostly attracted emotionally distant guys without ever questioning what about her attracted them to her. And isn’t it ironic that the only way the writers were able to humanize Samantha–which they later tried to undermine in the movie–was to give her cancer and a monogamous relationship? Bottom line: when women try to be like men sexually–which is a fundamentally flawed concept anyway because even men who act like alpha-bachelors ultimately feel disillusioned and wind up marrying someone to feel somewhat complete–it is usually rife with contradictions. Updike might not have taken the perfect tack with this story per se, but it is definitely worth noting that the attempt is not off-base.)

Like I said before, this book has its fair share of flaws but Updike’s writing style and his stretches of fantastic prose is enough for me to check out more of his books down the line.