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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointment, 8 Nov 2008
Being a lifelong Updike fan, I tend to simply buy his latest title before reading any reviews of it, on the basis that even sub-prime Updike is a damned sight better than a lot of other authors best efforts. I'm not sure I'd extend that view to this novel.
I read 'The Witches of Eastwick' many times; I loved the life in it, the sparkle and vibrancy. 'The Widows of Eastwick' is dulled, the sparkle gone and the characters diminished.
In 'Witches', the witchery was understated; it was secondary to the joy inherent in the characters. In 'Widows', it's become formalised, with circles and symbols that were unnecessary in the first book. A lot of prose is spent explaining, scene-setting, describing what happened to the characters in the first novel - perhaps needed, if a reader was to pick this novel up without having read the first book. If you have read it though, this becomes irritating in the end. The dialogue is wooden too.
Although what I found to be the largest disappointment was the characters themselves. Updike uses many of the same phrases to describe them now as he did in the first novel, and instead of conveying continuety, it reads as laziness. The characters haven't moved on. They were wives, then witches, then wives again, now widows. They never seem to have mentally developed since we left them in the late Seventies. Shame. Yes, this is a sad disappointment and it saddens me to write this.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If I could turn back time - I wouldn't!, 8 Nov 2008
this long overdue sequel to John Updike's 'the witches of eastwick' has received not a few bad reviews... but on opening the pages, I felt like I was greeting a long lost trio of friends. Now widowed, Sukie, Lexa and Jane revisit Eastwick 30 years on, where they first gained their powers of witchcraft and met Darryl van Horne. There isn't as much magic, mystery or maleficia here as in the first novel - the witches are older, each struggling with the sense of being ageing women alone in what is still, at base, a man's world. John Updike writes with spirit of the process of growing old, stripping bare the prejudice and fear that surrounds it, of the breakdown of health, of regrets and the need to atone, of being estranged from ones family and of the feeling that the world has moved on and questioning ones place in it. And this is probably why this book has had so many negative reviews - in a society obsessed with the pursuit of eternal youth, Updike's paean to age and death is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But for all that, he is still a master of his craft. The prose is sometimes stark, capturing the self doubt and the loneliness of the human condition, yet it is also forgiving, tender and poetic. The elderly crones of this adventure are more approachable than the freakish film of the first book - you can't imagine Cher coming back to play a forgetful, arthritic Alexandra! I devoured this book in a few hours and have both this and its precursor lined up ready to read again. Joue ici, joue la!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
''Returning to their mess'' she mumbled, 7 Jan 2009
`Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumours from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our pleasant town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable.'
The opening sentence from Updike's sequel to 1984's The Witches of Eastwick disposes of the husbands as concoctions and sets up the possibility for a return of the threesome to their old haunting ground. Unfortunately it then takes till page 121 before the husbands are fully disposed of and they are back in Eastwick. The first third of the novel is made up of travelogue type descriptions; firstly Alexandra's solo trip to the Rockies as a new widow, Jane's husband dies and the two widows go to Egypt, then Sukie's husband dies and all three go to China. This section is enjoyable enough but doesn't really progress the novel and Updike has always been better writing about small town America than anything else.
This novel is really about aging, the witches' power has declined with age, they don't have the energy to do much white or black magic once they are in Eastwick and Updike is good on writing about aging bodies and disconnection with the generation that have grown up to be the doctors, lawyers - movers and shakers of the modern world.
`Energy' Jane said. ` I can't remember what it was like to have any.' And there isn't the energy and brilliance here of Updike's earlier work but there's still much to enjoy despite too much talk about protons and electrons and a scene which deserves one of those bad sex writing awards.
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