The Witches of Eastwick

By John Updike

I was listening to NPR a few months back and they had an obituary on John Updike, an author I had certainly heard of, knew little about and had never read. I say obituary, but it was more of a remembrance, a tribute (link provided at the end of this post). It made me want to read his books.

I thought witches wouldn't be such a stretch for me after my streak of vampires lately.

This book spanked my bottom! John Updike can write. He writes a wonderfully fun and slightly sinister story (it was about witches!) with some incredible prose. I love the way he crafts paragraphs and his descriptions were surprising, hand painted images. He has a way with language. It made me want to read everything he has ever written.

The story is simply about three friends who are also witches and a man that comes into their lives and changes everything for them. They have some bewitching times and push the envelope on what society expects of women. Provoking, on a number of levels.

[Describing the sound of a cello] " . . . it's vibratory melancholy tones, pregnant with the sadness of wood grain and the shadowy largeness of trees . . ." (20)

"We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our own deaths. . . " (210)

"The little trees, the sapling sugar maples and the baby red oaks squatting close to the ground, were the first to turn, as if green were a feat of strength, and the smallest weaken first. Early in October the Virginia creeper had suddenly drenched in alizarin crimson the tumbled boulder wall at the back of her property, where the bog began; the drooping parallel daggers of the sumac then showed a red suffused with orange. Like the slow sound of a great gong, yellow overspread the woods, from the tan of beech and ash to the hickor's spotty gold and the flat butter color of the mitten-shaped leaves of the sassafras, mittens that can have a thumb or two or none. . . The ferns underfoot in fading declared an extravagant variety of forms. Each cried out, I am, I am. There was thus in fall a rebirth of identity out of summer's mob of verdure. The breadth of the event, from the beach plums and bayberries along Block Island Sound to the sycamores and horse-chestnut trees lining the venerable streets (Benefit, Benevolent) on Providence's College Hill, answered to something diffuse and gentle within Alexandra, her sense of merge, her passive ability to contemplate a tree and feel herself a rigid trunk with many arms running to their tips with sap, to become the oblong cloud oddly alone in the sky or the toad hopping from the mower's path into deeper damper grass - a wobbly bubble on leathery long legs, a spark of fear behind a warty broad forehead. She was that toad, and as well the cruel battered black blades attached to the motor's poisonous explosions. The panoramic ebb of chlorophyll from the swamps and hills of the Ocean State lifted Alexandra up like smoke, like the eye above a map. Even the exotic imports of the Newport rich - the English walnut, the Chinese smoke tree, the Acer japonicum - were all swept into this mass movement of surrender. A natural principle was being demostrated, that of divestment. We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life." (97 - 98)

Here is a link to the obituary:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2009/01/remembering-john-updike/

Apparently there are movies and musicals and all sorts of productions based on this book. I had a hard time getting the original cover, the one from the book I read!

Book 23