The Witches Of Eastwick
by John Updike
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
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.
