A critic in the New York Times once called them the Great Male Novelists—and, no, it wasn’t intended as a compliment. John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer may have first made their names as free spirits and prophets of liberation—in that capacity, I've seen their names linked with a motley crew, that also includes Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen—but in time they became inextricably linked with a pronounced masculinist—in the minds of some critics, misogynist —perspective in American fiction that flourished during the second half of the 20th century.
Of course, the attacks did not come solely from a feminist perspective. Others, finding an easy target, took their best shots. David Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male Narcissists"—and, in a fine quip, dubbed Updike as the leading chronicler of "the single most self- absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Yet Wallace then went on to admit that he had read 25 of Updike's books—apparently he liked to decorate his mind with Louis Quatorze . On the other extreme, parents in Medicine Bow, Wyoming rejected Updike's work for its frankness and profanity, while as recently as 2010, Updike’s writing was kept out of Texas jails in order to "protect the safety and security of our institution, but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders." (I gleefully imagine apprehended recidivists with copies of The Centaur and Bech: A Book mixed in with the loot from their latest bank heist.)
That said, women have been even tougher on Updike than the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "Updike provides no blameless way of being female," Margaret Atwood has complained. Wendy Lesser has labeled Updike as a "thorough misogynist." "It was the way he depicted women," Anna Shapiro has explained. “It was the way he described them – us. You felt yourself squirming, wanting to pull a blanket over you, preferably lead- lined, to shield yourself from the merest stray phrase or casual observation.”
Did Updike care? Around the time he published The Witches of Eastwick , the author noted "I've been criticized for making the women in my books subsidiary to the men." So what better way to address these concerns than by putting three women at the forefront of his latest novel?
Ah, the esteemed Mr. Updike, now softened by his entry into late middle age, was turning a new leaf. Hardly! The three women in question—Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont—are smarmy, manipulative, caustic and catty. And did I mention that they are witches? Something about the fictional Rhode Island town of Eastwick is apparently conducive to channeling and fortifying women’s supernatural powers. As a result, these three amigas terrorize the local community, and it's hard to tell who fares worse, their friends or their enemies.
The novel is not without its precedents. Fritz Leiber relied on a similar concept two decades earlier—a little less acerbically—in his novel Conjure Wife . And Updike, for all the ammo he directs on his female leads, will never top Flaubert in trenchant and unforgiving portrayal of the bêtises of fair sex. Yet the most obvious role model here is Macbeth , explicitly referenced in Updike’s novel—"tamale and tamale and tamale," witch Jane proclaims in anticipation of a Mexican dinner—in which three Shakespearean witches dished out their own sizable helpings of toil and trouble.
Updike offers blacker humor than any of these role models, and his book is at his best when it is most irreverent. Our three sorceresses have no monopoly on sacrilege here. Their shared love interest, a new arrival in Eastwick named Darryl Van Horne, can give them stiff competition. At one point in this novel, Updike lets his male lead deliver a guest sermon at the local Unitarian church on a subject of his own choosing—his topic turns out to be "This is a Terrible Creation." The interlude does little to advance the plot, but showcases Updike's zest in the outrageous and transgressive. This section of the novel, which reads like Hunter Thompson delivering a mix-and- match school book report on "The Grand Inquisitor" and The Selfish Gene , could stand-alone as a set piece or, with the addition of a few more one-liners, work as a comedy stand-up routine.
Throughout much of this book, however, Updike seems to waver between two opposed approaches for his novel. For long stretches he remains determined to present a sober and fastidiously detailed "landscape" novel—one that captures this part of Rhode Island in the same way that Cormac McCarthy evokes the US-Mexico border region or William Faulkner celebrates Yoknapatawpha County. Paragraphs stretch out over two or more pages, filled with references to geology, plant life, weather patterns, and local color. Sometimes Updike is overly fond in showing off the minutiae of his research—although, I hasten to add in his defense that this type of writing had more clout before the age of Googling, when the most obscure facts are only a few keystrokes away—but the better passages are quite breathtaking.
Here’s an example:
"The winter passed. In the darkroom of overnight blizzards, New England picture postcards were developed; the morning's sunshine displayed them in color. The not-quite-straight sidewalks of Dock Street, shoveled in patches, manifested patterns of compressed bootprints, like dirty white cookies with treads….The town itself in winter, deprived of tourists, settled more compactly upon itself, like a log fire burning late into the evening. A dwindled band of teen-agers hung out in front of the Superette, waiting for the psychedelic-painted VW van the drug dealer from South Providence drove….Martyrs of a sort were these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoast….martyrs too of a sort were the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts, risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel love—all sacrificing the outer world to the inner, proclaiming with this priority that everything solid- seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less account than a merciful rush of feeling."
I find it revealing that Updike is most powerful in conveying the particularities of place when he makes people part of the landscape. Here adulterers and drug addicts constitute the local fauna. In this regard, Updike is fundamentally different from those authors who can commune directly with nature—like Dr. Frankenstein, he needs the human element, the pulse, the flow of blood in the veins, the respiration, and plenty of body organs (usually below the belt ones for this author) to bring his creations to life.
Hence I am not surprised that the best descriptive passages here—as with the sermon above, throwaway set pieces about a tennis game and the performance of Bach's cello suites stand out—are never still lifes, but always imbued with passion and sometimes considerable angst. The fuel that drives an Updike novel is invariably the frictive human element, which constitutes the second novel hidden between the interstices of Updike's Rhode Island period piece. The machinations of his three witches and their agendas—usually hidden, partially or wholly—with family, lovers, fellow citizens and the alluring Mr. Van Horne provide the animating spark here. So much so that these sections tend to eclipse in your memory the sober, elegant writing that Updike periodically inserts to ground his fantastic story in everyday New England life.
For all its flaws, the novel has considerable panache. Updike himself was charmed enough by his creation to write a sequel, and Hollywood was even more charmed—funding a big budget film of The Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the star-studded cast. That said, the book did nothing to endear Mr. Updike to his feminist critics, and tended to elicit even more criticism from that quarter than his earlier novels. I suspect, however, that was part of Mr. Updike’s own hidden agenda from the start.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool .