(Updike isn’t interested in “Golden Girls”-style humor here his language is explicit and quite graphic.) Jane married a Boston banking type and Sukie ended up with a philandering computer salesman who liked to make fun of her new profession as a writer of romance novels.Īge hasn’t exactly turned them into sweet little grannies – Jane still has a mouth like a truck driver, and Sukie still spends much of her time thinking about or having sex.

Lexa married a cowboy-potter and settled in Taos, N.M. Slinking away from Eastwick, the women conjured new husbands for themselves. And Updike revives the technique in the sequel.) (If using a homosexual man as a plot device to punish “unnatural” women strikes you as creepy, well, it was. Then he married a younger woman, and after the witches hexed her, left town with her adolescent brother. They preferred to stay out all night drinking in Darryl Van Horne’s hot tub. When last we saw them, Alexandra was a potter and earth-mother type, sharp-tongued Jane played the cello and neglected her brood of children, and Sukie worked for the local newspaper and had lots of affairs.Īctually, all of the women were indifferent to motherhood. It probably would have fallen out of cultural memory were it not for the (also not very good) movie featuring Jack Nicholson with full-on jack-o’-lantern leer. “ The Witches of Eastwick,” by multiple award-winning author John Updike, was an unpleasant little book that didn’t do well by either its author or feminism. Nonetheless, that’s where The Widows of Eastwick meet up 30 years after killing a woman out of jealousy. When the three weird sisters from “Macbeth” asked, “When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” it’s probable that they didn’t have an all-inclusive tour of the Great Wall and Yangtze River in mind.

The widows of eastwick