Fruits of Blossoming Selfhood

By Paul Gray

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK by John Updike; Knopf; 336 pages; $15.95

Over the years some critics have charged that Author John Updike consistently slights his fictional females, making them interesting only insofar as they arouse or comfort men. Updike's eleventh novel does not seem designed to appease his accusers; indeed, it looks a lot like a gauntlet flung down at feminism. Readers should get ready for a particularly hot summer. Some of the squawking at beaches will be coming not from seagulls but from liberated ladies and gents who are reading The Witches of Eastwick.

The time is the late 1960s and the setting an imaginary but vividly realized village on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Experiencing "blossoming self-hood," three women divorce their husbands, tug their children into the vortex of downward economic mobility and take up careers. Alexandra Spofford makes clay figurines, Jane Smart plays the cello, and Sukie Rougemont writes a gossip column for the local paper. These friends meet almost every Thursday, as a coven of genuine, practicing witches: "In the right mood and into their third drinks they could erect a cone of power above them like a tent to the zenith."

They are randomly promiscuous: "Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties." Although they cast spells over their ex-husbands that reduced all three to inert household objects, their witchcraft is ordinarily mischievous rather than malign. When Alexandra wants to walk her dog on the beach without a leash, she simply conjures up a thunderstorm to drive bathers away.

Things begin to turn nasty once the mysterious Darryl Van Home has settled in at one of Eastwick's eeriest old houses. Updike drops devilishly loud hints about who Van Home really is. Alexandra thinks of him as the "dark prince" and recognizes "his diabolical arts." When the witches join him in his oversize steamy teak tub for the first of a series of baths and orgies, Darryl asks, "You kids think this is hot? I set the thermostat 20DEG higher when it's just me."

It does not bother the three women that their satanic host acts and thinks like the piggiest of male chauvinists. Lunching with Sukie, Van Home feels "a surge of possessive pride in her beauty, her vital spirit. His. His toy." He runs them through some bizarre and degrading sexual hoops, but the playthings adore "our dear Darryl. Our leader. Our redeemer from Eastwick ennui." His ample house gives their new-found senses of identity room to burgeon: "In Van Home's realm they left their children behind and became children themselves." This is where the action is, Sukie muses, "not here in town, where bitter water lapped the pilings and placed a shudder of reflected light upon the haggard faces of the citizens of Eastwick as they plodded through their civic and Christian duties."

That sentence alone should tip off seasoned Updike readers as to where the author's sympathies lie, but even newcomers might easily guess that the good guys are supposed to be the Christians. The witches grow ever less sympathetic. References to their "starved children," untrimmed hedges, unmowed lawns and deteriorating houses proliferate; witchcraft is evidently hell on property values. Worse follows when Darryl performs a typically dumb male stunt and marries a younger woman. His "devotees" are outraged. They secure some hair clippings, mix them into a waxen image and call down the curse of cancer. Their victim is the Other Woman.

The Witches of Eastwick manifests most of Updike's virtues; it is witty, ironic, engrossing and punctuated by transports of spectacular prose. The witchcraft scenes are oddly convincing, thanks to their grounding in everyday details. A dog, for example, can sense his mistress's magic by its smell: "A tiny burnt odor like a gas jet when first turned on." But full enjoyment of the novel depends, at Updike's insistence, on some curious beliefs about the real world. First: women who renounce the nurturing and domestic arts will invariably channel their dark creative energies toward evil (the divorcee who manages to feed her children and keep her residence tidy and lead an independent life is not a permissible character in the closed microcosm of Eastwick.) A corollary is asserted by the plot's closing permutations: what every liberated woman wants most of all is another husband.

One need not be a committed feminist to find these claims questionable, to say the least. Writing such a sophisticated locker-room joke in the current ideological climate proves Updike a daring and possibly foolhardy fellow. He should probably now make sure that all of his whiskers wash down the drain each morning; fingernails ought to be trimmed behind bolted doors. As he himself notes, "Witchcraft, once engendered in a community, has a way of running wild, out of control of those who have called it into being, running so freely as to confound victim and victimizer.'' --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Certainly the fact of witchcraft hung in the consciousness of Eastwick; a lump, a cloudy density generated by a thousand translucent overlays, a sort of heavenly body, it was rarely breathed of and, though dreadful, offered the consolation of completeness, of rounding out the picture, like the gas mains underneath Oak Street and the television aerials scraping Kojak and Pepsi commercials out of the sky. . . for years after the events gropingly and even reluctantly related here, the rumor of witchcraft stained this corner of Rhode Island, so that a prickliness of embarrassment and unease entered the atmosphere with the most innocent mention of Eastwick."