The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Widows of Eastwick
Book Review: John Updike's last novel - so sad!
Summary: 5 Stars
The Widows was just as enteraining as the Witches. It was good to catch up with these three again. This is Updike at his best. The world has lost one of its best (if not the best)of the contemporary authors. No one else has his ability to get inside a character's(especially a woman's) psyche. I moun his loss.Book Review: Much to Do About Little
Summary: 3 Stars
My title sums it up. Some, even much, is deliciously written; but ultimately Updike fails to make us care very much about his aging widow witches.Book Review: Ouch
Summary: 1 Stars
I have no idea what Updike was trying to do in "Widows." Others call this a travelogue. Well, not an enjoyable one. Was the first third of the book just to bring the three together, for us to reconnect with them as they were reconnecting? Didn't work. I wanted to run away from these old women on their tired group tours, herded on buses doing perfunctory visits to tourist sites.
Then they're off to Eastwick where, with a few of exceptions, they have very little to do with the folks there. The one moment of surprise, a death, is followed not by revenge, which would have given this story some meat, but by bewildering lectures on electromagnetism, a graphic sexual encounter, an inexplicable marriage, an odd interjection from an unidentified Eastwickian and an unsatisfying ending.
Good golly! Did I miss something? Would it have helped to have reread the first book? Surely Updike wouldn't require that. Yep, I finished it but it will be quickly forgotten. Not so with other Updike books. Try "S" to get Updike's flavor back in your brain, and wash away the bad taste of "Widows."
Book Review: Pedestrian Novel Fails to Excite
Summary: 1 Stars
As a novel, a lot of this book was a pretty good travelogue. We were not moved to finish the book. Not a page turner.Book Review: The Astral Plane
Summary: 4 Stars
Those are four Updike stars. Five Updike stars are reserved for books as good as all four in the Rabbit series. This is still delicious reading--and a chance to reflect, Updike style. There are other reviews that complain about the travelogue stuff at the beginning of "Widows of Eastwick" and I say, go for the ride. Watch these women re-connect with each other, listen to their inner thoughts about growing old ("thirty years had gone by like a game of pretend...") or remembering old lovers as they tour Beijing, Banff and The Pyramids. Taut fiction structure? Perhaps not. Enjoyable Updike prose? Yes.
"Sukie had imagined before turning old that quirky bad traits and mannerisms would fall away once the need to make a sexual impression was removed. Without the distraction of sex, a realer more honest self would be revealed. But it is sex, it turns out, that engages us in society and keeps us on our toes and persuades us to retract our rough edges, so we can mix in."
This sequel is about homogenization, about turning soft, about the riff-raff of America and the transformation of its towns (the barber shop to Ben & Jerry's). It's about wiccans, materialism, melancholy, quantum theory, and "how lightly civilization rests on the continents." It's about charkas, and being cleansed. It's about ceremonies (it's terrific to compare the living room "cone" scene with the big church scene), the astral plane and manufactured holidays. It's about the "power of the cone" and might not make too much sense unless you've read the first.
I really can't imagine reading this without reading the first book and knowing the references, particularly to Van Horne. It's a bit cartoonish at times, but I think it's fun to watch Updike work in a playground with fewer rules and to pour attitudes and ideas through the minds of three very different yet connected women.
Throughout, there are many rich Updike observations and great heapings of creamy Updike prose.
"She had watched the process of oxidization so intently that her brow and throat and collar area had sympathetically broken into a sweat. The circle she had drawn had become the base of a cone of power like a bison-skin teepee overheated by a cooking fire of mesquite twigs at its center."
It's sometimes a bit much, just over the top. But it fits with the mystical, ethereal moments that pop up in this book. This is probably not for everyone. For the Rabbit books alone (and even "Memories of the Ford Administration") I will always read a new Updike.
PS: I "read" this on Audio CD and Kate Reading's performance was dynamic and gripping; very well done.