Here’s a taste from the novel’s opening pages.
She returned to putting up Mason jars of spaghetti sauce, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her children could consume even if bewitched for a hundred years in an Italian fairy tale, jar upon jar lifted steaming from the white-speckled blue boiler on the trembling, singing round wire rack.
“She” is Alexandra Spofford, one of the three titular “witches” of Eastwick.
It was, she dimly perceived, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. Her recipe called for no onions, two cloves of garlic minced and sautéed for three minutes (no more, no less; that was the magic) in heated oil, plenty of sugar to counteract acidity, a single grated carrot, more pepper than salt; but the teaspoon of crumbled basil is what catered to virility, and the dash of belladonna provided the release without which virility is merely a murderous congestion.
Alexandra is a middle-aged widow, the matriarch of her coven of two other similarly situated women, and her “magic” is more typically expressed in Updike’s stylized symbolism than in more overt actions of witchcraft.
All this must be added to her own tomatoes, picked and stored on every window sill these weeks past and now sliced and fed to the blender: ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plants, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover’s testicles in her hand.
Maybe you get the point. Updike has a theme, and he’s going to squeeze every last drop of tomato juice out of it -- trying to delight you with his prose at the same time he’s clobbering you over the head with it.
She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so notoriously tolerant of corpulence.
The whole novel is like this. It weaves its spell over you, but when it’s finished you have to sit back and wonder what the heck it was all about.
It seems to be saying something. The Wikipedia entry I read on it talks about the controversy with which it was met. Did Updike write a feminist novel? Alexandra and her coven, after all, rise in their power only after their husbands have been dispatched. Or did he write a sexist one? After all, Alexandra and her coven succumb to the wily charms of Darryl Van Horne (so clearly the metaphoric devil in this allegorical tale that one barely needs to mention it). Or did Updike write a satirical novel? After all, Alexandra and her coven only rise and fall amidst the bevy of blinkered characters that populate Eastwick, a New England town that can only exist in Updike’s imagination because its patterns and passions must exist in his actual experience.
Yes. In the final analysis, I would have to say that Updike wrote exactly the kind of novel you might want this one to be. Feminist. Sexist. Satiric. Pick your poison -- or perhaps your witch’s potion. It’s all there for you to find if you look hard enough.
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