' - The Witches of Eastwick' - - NYTimes.com 'The Witches of Eastwick' Review by MARGARET ATWOOD Published: May 13, 1984 ''THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK'' is John Updike's first novel since the much-celebrated ''Rabbit Is Rich,'' and a strange and marvelous organism it proves to be. Like his third novel, ''The Centaur,'' it is a departure from baroque realism. This time, too, Mr. Updike transposes mythology into the minor keys of small town America, but this time he pulls it off, possibly because, like Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson before him, he finds wickedness and mischief more engrossing as subjects than goodness and wisdom. Mr. Updike's titles are often quite literal, and ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is just what it says. It's indeed about witches, real ones, who can fly through the air, levitate, hex people and make love charms that work, and they live in a town called Eastwick. It's Eastwick rather than Westwick, since, as we all know, it's the east wind that blows no good.

Eastwick purports to be in Rhode Island because, as the book itself points out, Rhode Island was the place of exile for Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan foremother who was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay colony by the forefathers for female insubordination, a quality these witches have in surplus. These are not 1980's Womanpower witches. They aren't at all interested in healing the earth, communing with the Great Goddess, or gaining Power- within (as opposed to Power-over). These are bad Witches, and Power-within, as far as they are concerned, is no good at all unless you can zap somebody with it. They are spiritual descendants of the 17th-century New England strain and go in for sabbats, sticking pins in wax images, kissing the Devil's backside and phallus worship; this latter though - since it is Updike - is qualified worship. The Great Goddess is present only in the form of Nature itself, or, in this book, Nature herself, with which they, both as women and as witches, are supposed to have special affinities. Nature, however, is far from Wordsworth's big motherly breast.

She, or it, is red in tooth, claw and cancer cell, at best lovely and cruel, at worst merely cruel. ''Nature kills constantly, and we call her beautiful.'' How did these middle-class, small-town, otherwise ordinary women get their witchy powers? Simple. They became husbandless. All three are divorcees and embodiments of what American small-town society tends to think about divorcees. Whether you leave your husband or are left ''doesn't make any difference,'' which will be news to many abandoned women stuck with full child support. Divorced then, and, with the images of their former husbands shrunk and dried and stored away in their minds and kitchens and cellars, they are free to be themselves, an activity Mr. Updike regards with some misgivings, as he regards most catchwords and psychofads. Being yourself involves artistic activity, albeit of minor kinds. Lexa makes ceramic earthmothers, which are sold in the local crafts store, Jane plays the cello, and Sukie writes, badly, a gossip column for the weekly paper, her participles dangling like earrings.

All three are dabblers, but their ''creativity'' is seen in the same light as that of other, more accomplished female artists. The townspeople of Eastwick, who act as a collective chorus, credit them with ''a certain distinction, an inner boiling such as had in other cloistral towns produced Emily Dickinson's verses and Emily Bront"e's inspired novel.'' IT'S doubtful, however, that either of the Emilys went in for the sexual loop-the-loops indulged in by these three weird sisters. Sisters in more senses than one because the novel is cunningly set at a precise moment in America's recent history. The women's movement has been around just long enough for some of its phrases to have seeped from New York to the outer darkness of provincial towns like Eastwick, and the witches toss around words like ''chauvinist'' in light social repartee. In the public, male world, which is offstage, the Vietnam War goes on, watched by the witches' children on their television sets, and the antiwar activists are making bombs in cellars. The witches don't busy themselves with ''causes,'' however.

At first, they are merely restless and bored; they amuse themselves with spiteful gossip, playing mischievous tricks and seducing unhappily married men, which Eastwick supplies in strength; for if the witches are bad, the wives are worse, and the men are eviscerated. ''Marriage,'' one of the husbands thinks, ''is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.'' But enter the Devil, the world's best remedy for women's boredom, in the form of the dark, not very handsome but definitely mysterious stranger Darryl Van Horne, who collects pop art and has an obvious name. Now mischief turns to maleficio , real evil occurs and people die, because Van Horne's horn becomes a bone of contention - nothing like not enough men to go around to get the witches' cauldrons bubbling. And when Van Horne is snatched into marriage by a newcomer witchlet, the eye of newt comes out in earnest.

1 The Witches of Eastwick (Eastwick, book 1) by John Updike The Witches of Eastwick A novel by John Updike The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Home, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio. John Updike Biography | National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture His pen rarely at rest, John Updike has been publishing fiction, essays, and poetry since the mid-fifties, when he was a staff writer at the New Yorker, contributing material for the “Talk of the Town” sections.

“Of all modern American writers,” writes Adam Gopnik in Humanities magazine, “Updike comes closest to meeting Virginia Woolf’s demand that a writer’s only job is to get himself, or herself, expressed without impediments." Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, published in 1989, paints the landscape of his boyhood in Shillington, on the outskirts of Reading, southwest of the formerly solid mill town and extending into Pennsylvania Dutch farm country. But Updike’s interests pulled him north and east—first, toward the Reading Museum, within walking distance of his hometown (the fictional Olinger, which is the setting for many early short stories), and then, with a full scholarship in hand, to Harvard University, where, as an English major, he did a thesis on seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick, and graduated summa cum laude in 1954. He has had a sustained and sustaining interest in art, beginning in childhood when he had his first drawing lessons and, as a devotee of comic strips, wrote a perspicacious fan letter to the creator of “Little Orphan Annie,” Harold Gray.

Much later, at the Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president in his senior year, he was still at it. In one of his Lampoon cartoons, two apparent seekers of universal awareness sit cross-legged and side by side, both clad in loose, open garb most appropriate for meditation, and one says to the other, “Don’t look now, but I think my navel is contemplating me.” During that senior year, Lampoon staff recall, he wrote about two-thirds of every issue. At Harvard he took art classes with Hyman Bloom, a painter who was associated with a style known as Boston Expressionism. Then a Knox Fellowship gave Updike the wherewithal to study for a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in Oxford, England. Painting had taught him, he once said, “how difficult it is to see things exactly as they are, and that the painting is ‘there’ as a book is not.” In Just Looking, 1989, and Still Looking, 2005, Updike gathered the impressions he’s been making over a lifetime of observing painting and sculpture.

In an essay in the former he captures in limpid prose Vermeer’s achievement in paint in View of Delft: “an instant of flux forever held.” And in the latter, in a chapter on Jackson Pollock, Updike glimpses, and so we do, too, the essence of what Pollock’s drip-painting could accomplish—“an image, in dots and lines and little curdled clouds of dull color, of the cosmos.” His interest in art has also shown in his fiction. One of his later novels, Seek My Face, 2002, follows the lines of the life of an aging painter who often lived in the shadows of her more famous husband, also a painter. In The Witches of Eastwick, 1984, the novel’s hero, the devil, in the form of one Darryl Van Horne, is an ecstatic collector of Pop art. “I suppose,” Updike has said, “since I was an aspiring cartoonist once, I could ‘relate’ . . . to the Pop art imagery.

Witches takes place in a post-Pop art time, so in a sense dust has gathered on the movement, which was fairly short-lived.” Harold Bloom has called The Witches of Eastwick one of Updike’s most remarkable books, as all of his “themes and images coalesce in a rich, resonant swirl.” Of Witches Updike himself remarked that “the touch of magical realism gave it a kind of spriteliness for me.” About his fiction in general he has said, “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due.” When considering the entire scope of his work, readers of American fiction are most often put in mind of Harry Angstrom, the character from the Rabbit saga with whom Updike seemed for many years to be on closest, if often contentious, terms.

American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” British novelist Martin Amis has seen the hand of a master in Rabbit at Rest, 1990, marveling, “This novel is enduringly eloquent about weariness, age and disgust, in a prose that is always fresh, nubile, and unwitherable.” Avid readers and admirers also point to many other works in his eclectic oeuvre as masterpieces, including The Centaur, 1963, set, as are the Rabbit novels, in Pennsylvania and winner of France’s prize for best foreign book; Couples, 1968, set in the fictional Tarbox, modeled after Ipswich, Massachusetts, where Updike and his first wife and family moved from Manhattan in 1957; and Roger’s Version, 1986, which magisterially sets a middle-aged divinity professor and a computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on a metaphysical collision course.

He is known to many first as an author of short stories, with dozens having graced the pages of the New Yorker before being published in collections. Many other readers know his shorter fiction either through the O. Henry Prize Stories or anthologies of American literature, where they would have entered into the at times sad, at times triumphant thoughts of, say, a certain check-out clerk at the local grocery store; “A & P” serving as a model of dramatic irony for at least two generations of English literature teachers. Updike is, of course, also an accomplished literary critic, whose reviews and essays are as much distinguished by their breadth of understanding as by their charitable disposition. Examples of his critical acumen frequently appear in The New York Review of Books, and he received his second National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for Hugging the Shore, including such gems as the micro-essay “A Mild ‘Complaint,’” which skewers the misuses and ‘misusers’ of ‘scare quotes.’ He has also applied his habile wit to poetry, composing early on a collection called The Carpentered Hen in 1954. Three more tomes of verse followed.

Collected Poems, 1953-1993, comprises what he calls his “beloved waifs.” After having met Katharine White, fiction editor at the New Yorker during his year of study at the Ruskin School, he began submitting stories regularly to the magazine and then settled in an apartment in Manhattan for his two-year stint there. Migrating from Gotham to Ipswich, he thrived amid salubrious sea breezes and continued to publish at the rate he set for himself early in his career, about a book a year. It was during this time, roughly 1957 to 1970 that he published The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Run, Pigeon Feathers, The Centaur, and Bech: A Book, introducing readers to his irreverent alter ego, Henry Bech. If minute attention to craftsmanship has always been a hallmark of Updike’s work, so have inventiveness and creative unpredictability.

After moving to Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, with his second wife, Martha, in 1982, he brought forth work that differed widely in subject matter and setting: In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996, a multigenerational, twentieth century-spanning family saga summing up increasingly secular, movie-mad America; Toward the End of Time, 1997, set in a near-future, post-nuclear war New England with menacing undercurrents; Gertrude and Claudius, 2000, concerned with the earlier life of Hamlet’s mother, Claudius, and Old Hamlet; and Terrorist, 2006, featuring the radicalized Islamist teenage son of an absent Arab father and an Irish-American mother. In the half century he has been writing he has garnered many literary prizes, awards, and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, twice each; the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is among a select few to have received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

Albright College in Reading (the fictional Brewer readers first encountered in Rabbit Run) bestowed upon him an honorary Litt.D. degree in 1982. Along with his finely tuned regard for painting, which has often provided the visual element for his fiction, there has been a deep and abiding appreciation of the reading life in general and a love of the book in particular. He has alluded to an imagined reader of his, ideal or otherwise, as being a teenage boy who happens upon one of his books on the dusty shelves of some library one afternoon looking for literary adventure. In a speech two years ago at the American Booksellers Association convention, he encouraged beleaguered booksellers to “defend [their] lonely forts. . . . For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.” In fall 2007 Updike came out with a collection of essays, Due Considerations. A new novel, The Widows of Eastwick, is due out in fall 2008. After so many words, is America’s leading man of letters even marginally at rest? No, he is still looking and still writing.

—Steve Moyer The Witches of Eastwick by Updike, First Edition - AbeBooks The Witches of Eastwick by Updike, First Edition You Searched For: Results (1 - 30) of 263 1 ISBN 10: 0233976655 ISBN 13: 9780233976655 Used First Edition ISBN 10: 0449206475 ISBN 13: 9780449206478 Used Mass Market Paperback First Edition Quantity Available: 1 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Fawcett Gold Medal, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1985. Mass Market Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good. First Ballantine Books Edition. Wraps have light wear, spine unbent. Pages are clean with no markings in text. Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall.

Bookseller Inventory # 239443 ISBN 10: 0233976655 ISBN 13: 9780233976655 Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 0394537602 ISBN 13: 9780394537603 Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 0394537602 ISBN 13: 9780394537603 Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 0394537602 ISBN 13: 9780394537603 Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Alfred A. Knopf, U.S.A., 1984. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. This hardcover, first edition book is in good condition and shows no sign of damage. Friends of the Bridgeport Public Library use these funds to promote literacy in Bridgeport schools and in the community.

Bookseller Inventory # 000421 ISBN 10: 0394537602 ISBN 13: 9780394537603 Used Hardcover First Edition ISBN 10: 0394537602 ISBN 13: 9780394537603 Used Hardcover First Edition Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Alfred a Knopf Inc, Westminister, Maryland, U.S.A., 1984. Hard Cover Clothbound. Book Condition: Good to Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good (Mylar protected}. First Trade Edition. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. [307 pp] . FIRST TRADE EDITION - HARDCOVER - GOOD to VERY GOOD in GOOD Mylar-protected DJ. Top edge dyed blue. Minor coffee stains on uncut fore edge and last blank page; cocked spine. Jacket extremities have a few small chips, closed tears, and a couple wrinkle creases. Jacket's cover illustrations are unaffected.

All said, this would still make an acceptable---and affordable---gift for a John Updike enthusiast. Bookseller Inventory # 08273 "The Witches Of Eastwick" | Articles | The List "The Witches Of Eastwick" The Witches of Eastwick 27 Nov 2008 MUSICAL The compelling formula of Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City can be traced to US writer John Updike’s 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick, in which three frustrated women invoke cosmic powers to summon their ideal man. They are… John Updike - The Widows of Eastwick 30 Oct 2008 For almost half a century, novelist, poet and New Yorker writer John Updike has chronicled the concerns, thoughts and sexual foibles of the American middle class.

Not always successfully though, as can be forgiven amidst a career which embraces almost… 3 Aug 2010 The Wire's Lester Freamon stars in the musical he wrote Clarke Peters, best known for his role in US cop show The Wire, talks to Kelly Apter about taking time out to appear in the hit musical he wrote himself 11 Sep 2009 Celebrity Gossip Rebecca Romijn doesn't want more children. The 36-year-old actress - who has eight-month-old twins Dolly and Charlie with husband Jerry O'Connell - is happy with her family and has no plans to add to her brood. She said: "I'm pretty sure that this… 1 Jan 2005 100 Best Scottish Books of all Time The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of cinema’s Holy Grails. Plans, scripts, outlines and pitches lie in archives, collections and bottom drawers from Holyrood to Hollywood. Hardly a writer who knows the book – myself… 6 Nov 2013 Film gossip Aaron Eckhart will star in psychological thriller 'Fade Out'.

The 'Thank You For Smoking' star has signed on to play the lead in veteran producer Robert Salerno's directorial debut about a screenwriter who loses his grip on reality. Salerno - best… 25 Mar 2009 Celebrity Gossip Rebecca Romijn films sex scenes in front of her family. The 36-year-old actress - who has three-month-old twins Dolly and Charlie with husband Jerry O'Connell - is currently shooting new US TV series 'The Witches of Eastwick', and has her twins on… 5 Aug 2008 Audio At this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival I had the great pleasure of grabbing a chat with the American actor, and proud son of Illinois, Richard Jenkins. I have been a great admirer of Jenkins work as a character actor since his marginal… Talkin' Broadway Regional News & Reviews - "The Witches of Eastwick" - 9/19/14 Also see Sarah's review of The Singularity James Barbour and Ensemble There's a feel of fall in the air, evoking images of colorful leaves on the trees, carved pumpkins and warm apple cider.

Halloween is right around the corner, but the Ogunquit Playhouse is getting a head start on the tricks and treats with the American Northeast premiere of producer Cameron MacKintosh's musical comedy The Witches of Eastwick. Featuring Emmy Award-winner Sally Struthers and a quartet of Broadway veterans in the lead roles, the Ogunquit Playhouse continues its 82-year tradition of creating and staging its exclusive trademark productions with established performers and a first-rate design team. Based on the 1984 novel by John Updike and subsequent 1987 Warner Brothers film version, The Witches of Eastwick is set in 1967 in the fictional quintessential small town of Eastwick, Rhode Island. The moment in time is relevant as the story incorporates the women's movement and the sexual revolution, both burgeoning aspects of that social climate, and the location pays homage to Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan leader who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to neighboring Rhody for her religious convictions.

When he wrote the novel, Updike was living in Ipswich, MA, a stone's throw from the infamous Salem witch trials of the 17th century, and one might suggest that the spirits of the accused were his muses. Sara Gettelfinger (Alexandra Spofford), Mamie Parris (Jane Smart) and Nancy Anderson (Sukie Rougemont) are equally terrific as three bored, lonely women, either divorced or widowed, who dream together of the ideal man who might rescue them from their fate. Their wishes conjure up the devilish, randy Darryl Van Horne (James Barbour, voraciously chewing the scenery) whose arrival in town creates a frenzy when he brings temptation into their midst, setting the telephone wires on fire and turning the gossipy populace on its collective ear. The town's resident busybody and self-anointed moral guardian Felicia Gabriel (Struthers), disturbed by Van Horne's purchase of the Lenox Mansion, a venerable estate built by her grandfather, and concerned that he will disturb a nearby snowy egret habitat, challenges him for the position of King of the Castle.

However, as he tells her, she has no idea who she is dealing with. Darryl's main purpose is to seduce Alex, Jane and Sukie by nurturing their artistic talents, releasing their inner creativity and powers. They grow confident and blossom in their chosen pursuits (sculpting, cello playing and writing, respectively), learn to do magic, and the sex ain't bad, either. Eventually, Darryl has an impact on everyone in town, awakening the womenfolk's libido, schooling the men on how to please the women and using his three witches' newfound talent to spell the comeuppance of Felicia. As good as she is at playing the bossy pants side of her character, Struthers is a riot when it comes time for her to choke up a litany of items, including a cherry pit, tennis ball, feathers, a string of pearls and a long-necked egret. When she sings, you barely notice that she capably belts and carries the tune because her forceful delivery is in service of the character, the flag-waving, faux saccharine figure of intolerance.

The vocal chemistry among the three leading women is a treat whenever they harmonize ("Make Him Mine," "I Wish I May," "Look At Me") and each shines in her moment in the spotlight with Barbour in the first act. He has a rich, powerful baritone that can be mellow or raunchy, as called for by the song, and he shows a flair for gospel in "The Glory of Me." These four pros know how to bring it and elevate The Witches of Eastwick to a higher level than the book and music could reach without their powers. Among the changes in the adaptation from the film to the stage is the addition of Alex's teenage son Michael and the forbidden apple of his eye, Jennifer, the virginal daughter of Felicia and her long-suffering husband Clyde (Jim Walton, quietly effective). With due praise for the performances of Joey Barriero and Brittney Santoro as the star-crossed lovers, their characters and the cliché of their situation add up to the least interesting aspect of the book and culminate in a scene that requires extreme suspension of disbelief (and that's saying a lot in a show about magic).

Perhaps the movie ending was too challenging to pull off, but the kids distract from the more compelling story lines of the adults. Several musical numbers are great fun, thanks to Lisa Stevens' choreography and the energetic ensemble (shout outs for busybody Julia Mosby and Van Horne's valet Jason Perez). "Dirty Laundry" and "Dance With The Devil" are practically showstoppers, augmented by Dustin Cross' costumes and Michael Schweikardt's set design. Great work from Paul Miller (lighting design), Jeremy Oleksa (sound design), Shawn Boyle (projections) and Matthew Holtzclaw (Illusions, Magic Consultant) infuses The Witches of Eastwick with exciting visual and aural effects. Music Director Julian Bigg leads nine live musicians. Director Shaun Kerrison waves his wand over all of the components and - presto! - everything comes together for an entertaining look at the power of believing in yourself.

The Witches of Eastwick A Musical Comedy by John Dempsey and Dana Rowe, Based on the novel by John Updike and the Warner Brothers Motion Picture, performances through September 27 at Ogunquit Playhouse, 10 Main Street (Rte.1) Ogunquit, Maine; Box Office 207-646-5511 or .

Book and Lyrics by John Dempsey, Music by Dana Rowe, Orchestrations by William David Brohn, Music Direction/Supervision by Julian Bigg, Choreography by Lisa Stevens, Direction by Shaun Kerrison; Costume Design, Dustin Cross; Lighting Design, Paul Miller; Set Design, Michael Schweikardt; Sound Design, Jeremy Oleksa; Projections, Shawn Boyle; Illusions Magic Consultant, Matthew Holtzclaw; Flying Effects, ZFX, Inc.; Hair & Makeup Design, Britt Griffith; Production Stage Manager, Tracey Woolley Cast: James Barbour, Sara Gettelfinger, Mamie Parris, Nancy Anderson, Sally Struthers, Jim Walton, Brittney Santoro, Joey Barriero, Lily Ramras, Jason Perez, Julia Mosby, Randall McNeal, Jenny Hickman, Stephen Cerf, Heather Jane Rolff, Jonathan Brody, Marjorie Failoni, Tom Gamblin, Dawn Trautman, Jeffrey Zicker Photo: Gary Ng The witches of Eastwick (Book, 1984) [WorldCat.org] The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message.

E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at Title: The witches of Eastwick Author: John Updike; Michael Deas Publisher: Franklin Center, Pa. : Franklin Library, 1984. OCLC:12160917 The ReCaptcha terms you entered were incorrect. Please try to match the 2 words shown in the window, or try the audio version. NYTimes THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK By John Updike. 307 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95. ''THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK'' is John Updike's first novel since the much-celebrated ''Rabbit Is Rich,'' and a strange and marvelous organism it proves to be. Like his third novel, ''The Centaur,'' it is a departure from baroque realism. This time, too, Mr. Updike transposes mythology into the minor keys of small Mr. Updike's titles are often quite literal, and ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is just what it says.

It's indeed about witches, real ones, who can fly through the air, levitate, hex people and make love charms that work, and they live in a town called Eastwick. It's Eastwick rather than Westwick, since, as we all know, it's the east wind that blows no good. Eastwick purports to be in Rhode Island because, as the book itself points out, Rhode Island was the place of exile for Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan foremother who was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay colony by the forefathers for female insubordination, a quality these witches have in surplus. These are not 1980's Womanpower witches. They aren't at all interested in healing the earth, communing with the Great Goddess, or gaining Power- within (as opposed to Power-over). These are bad Witches, and Power-within, as far as they are concerned, is no good at all unless you can zap somebody with it. They are spiritual descendants of the 17th-century New England strain and go in for sabbats, sticking pins in wax images, kissing the Devil's backside and phallus worship; this latter though - since it is Updike - is qualified worship.

The Great Goddess is present only in the form of Nature itself, or, in this book, Nature herself, with which they, both as women and as witches, are supposed to have special affinities. Nature, however, is far from Wordsworth's big motherly breast. She, or it, is red in tooth, claw and cancer cell, at best lovely and cruel, at worst merely cruel. ''Nature kills constantly, and we call her beautiful.'' How did these middle-class, small-town, otherwise ordinary women get their witchy powers? Simple. They became husbandless. All three are divorcees and embodiments of what American small-town society tends to think about divorcees. Whether you leave your husband or are left ''doesn't make any difference,'' which will be news to many abandoned women stuck with full child support. Divorced then, and, with the images of their former husbands shrunk and dried and stored away in their minds and kitchens and cellars, they are free to be themselves, an activity Mr. Updike regards with some misgivings, as he regards most catchwords and psychofads. Being yourself involves artistic activity, albeit of minor kinds.

Lexa makes ceramic earthmothers, which are sold in the local crafts store, Jane plays the cello, and Sukie writes, badly, a gossip column for the weekly paper, her participles dangling like earrings. All three are dabblers, but their ''creativity'' is seen in the same light as that of other, more accomplished female artists. The townspeople of Eastwick, who act as a collective chorus, credit them with ''a certain distinction, an inner boiling such as had in other cloistral towns produced Emily Dickinson's verses and Emily Bront"e's inspired novel.'' IT'S doubtful, however, that either of the Emilys went in for the sexual loop-the-loops indulged in by these three weird sisters. Sisters in more senses than one because the novel is cunningly set at a precise moment in America's recent history. The women's movement has been around just long enough for some of its phrases to have seeped from New York to the outer darkness of provincial towns like Eastwick, and the witches toss around words like ''chauvinist'' in light social repartee.

In the public, male world, which is offstage, the Vietnam War goes on, watched by the witches' children on their television sets, and the antiwar activists are making bombs in cellars. The witches don't busy themselves with ''causes,'' however. At first, they are merely restless and bored; they amuse themselves with spiteful gossip, playing mischievous tricks and seducing unhappily married men, which Eastwick supplies in strength; for if the witches are bad, the wives are worse, and the men are eviscerated. ''Marriage,'' one of the husbands thinks, ''is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.'' But enter the Devil, the world's best remedy for women's boredom, in the form of the dark, not very handsome but definitely mysterious stranger Darryl Van Horne, who collects pop art and has an obvious name. Now mischief turns to maleficio , real evil occurs and people die, because Van Horne's horn becomes a bone of contention - nothing like not enough men to go around to get the witches' cauldrons bubbling.

And when Van Horne is snatched into marriage by a newcomer witchlet, the eye of newt comes out in earnest. This may sound like an unpromising framework for a serious novelist. Has Mr. Updike entered second childhood and reverted to Rosemary's babyland? I don't think so. For one thing, ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is too well done. Like Van Horne, Mr. Updike has always wondered what it would be like to be a woman, and his witches give him a lot of scope for this fantasy. Lexa in particular, who is the oldest, the plumpest, the kindest and the closest to Nature, is a fitting vehicle for some of his most breathtaking similes. In line of descent, he is perhaps closer than any other living American writer to the Puritan view of Nature as a lexicon written by God, but in hieroglyphs, so that unending translation is needed. Mr. Updike's prose, here more than ever, is a welter of suggestive metaphors and cross-references, which constantly point toward a meaning constantly evasive. His version of witchcraft is closely tied to both carnality and mortality.

Magic is hope in the face of inevitable decay. The houses and the furniture molder, and so do the people. The portrait of Felicia Gabriel, victim wife and degenerate after-image of the one-time ''peppy'' American cheerleading sweetheart, is gruesomely convincing. Bodies are described in loving detail, down to the last tuft, wart, wrinkle and bit of food stuck in the teeth. No one is better than Mr. Updike at conveying the sadness of the sexual, the melancholy of motel affairs - ''amiable human awkwardness,'' Lexa calls it. This is a book that redefines magic realism. There's room too for bravura writing. The widdershins dance, portrayed as a tennis game in which the ball turns into a bat, followed by the sabbat as a hot-tub- and-pot session, is particularly fetching. Students of traditional Devil-lore will have as much fun with these transpositions as Mr. Updike had.

Van Horne, for instance, is part Mephistopheles, offering Faustian pacts and lusting for souls, part alchemist-chemist, and part Miltonic Satan, hollow at the core; but he's also a shambling klutz whose favorite comic book is - what else? - Captain Marvel. Much of ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is satire, some of it literary playfulness and some plain bitchery. It could be that any attempt to analyze further would be like taking an elephant gun to a puff pastry: An Updike should not mean but be. But again, I don't think so. What a culture has to say about witchcraft, whether in jest or in earnest, has a lot to do with its views of sexuality and power, and especially with the apportioning of powers between the sexes. The witches were burned not because they were pitied but because they were feared. Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne aside, the great American witchcraft classic is ''The Wizard of Oz,'' and Mr. Updike's book reads like a rewrite.

In the original, a good little girl and her familiar, accompanied by three amputated males, one sans brain, one sans heart and one sans guts, go seeking a wizard who turns out to be a charlatan. The witches in ''Oz'' really have superhuman powers, but the male figures do not. Mr. Updike's Land of Oz is the real America, but the men in it need a lot more than self-confidence; there's no Glinda the Good, and the Dorothy-like ingenue is a ''wimp'' who gets her comeuppance. It's the three witches of Eastwick who go back, in the end, to the equivalent of Kansas - marriage, flat and gray maybe, but at least known. ''The Witches of Eastwick'' could be and probably will be interpreted as just another episode in the long- running American serial called ''Blaming Mom.'' The Woman-as-Nature-as-magic-as-powerful-as-bad-Mom package has gone the rounds before, sometimes accompanied by the smell of burning. If prattle of witchcraft is heard in the land, can the hunt be far behind? Mr. Updike provides no blameless way of being female.

Hackles will rise, the word ''backlash'' will be spoken; but anyone speaking it should look at the men in this book, who, while proclaiming their individual emptiness, are collectively, offstage, blowing up Vietnam. That's male magic. Men, say the witches, more than once, are full of rage because they can't make babies, and even male babies have at their center ''that aggressive vacuum.'' Shazam indeed! A* MARTIAN might wonder at the American propensity for tossing the power football. Each sex hurls it at the other with amazing regularity, each crediting the other with more power than the other thinks it has, and the characters in this book join in the game with glee. The aim seems to be the avoidance of responsibility, the reversion to a childlike state of Huckleberry Finn-like ''freedom.'' What the witches want from the Devil is to play without consequences. But all the Devil can really offer is temptation; hot-tubbery has its price, and the Devil must have his due; with the act of creation comes irreversibility, and guilt. Mr. Updike takes ''sisterhood is powerful'' at its word and imagines it literally.

What if sisterhood really is powerful? What will the sisters use their ''powers'' for? And what - given human nature, of which Mr. Updike takes not too bright a view - what then? Luckily these witches are only interested in the ''personal,'' rather than the ''political''; otherwise they might have done something unfrivolous, like inventing the hydrogen bomb. ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is an excursion rather than a destination. Like its characters, it indulges in metamorphoses, reading at one moment like Kierkegaard, at the next like Swift's ''Modest Proposal,'' and at the next like Archie comics, with some John Keats thrown in. This quirkiness is part of its charm, for, despite everything, charming it is. As for the witches themselves, there's a strong suggestion that they are products of Eastwick's - read America's - own fantasy life. If so, it's as well to know about it. That's the serious reason for reading this book. The other reasons have to do with the skill and inventiveness of the writing, the accuracy of the detail, the sheer energy of the witches and, above all, the practicality of the charms.

The ones for getting suitable husbands are particularly useful. You want a rich one, for a change? First you sprinkle a tuxedo with your perfume and your precious bodily fluids and then. . . .B HED GOES HERE Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts coast is just north of Salem. And it is there, appropriately enough, that John Updike wrote ''The Witches of Eastwick.'' In a sense, he has concocted a spell to do three things: serve a longtime interest in witchcraft, satisfy the urge to write a murder mystery set near the sea and reply to critics who say the women in his books are a second sex. Mr. Updike, who was 52 in March, said over the telephone that an English translation of ''La Sorci ere'' by Jules Michelet, the 19th-century French historian, had made a strong impression on him in college. It ''puts forward the notion, which to me is quite striking, that pre-Christian paganism was kept alive by witchcraft. Over the years I've been interested in what a witch is. There is a kind of witch in all of us.

I have also long wanted to write a murder mystery involving tides, a murder in the marshes. The two ideas merged.'' Finally, he said, his youthful student's voice sounding self-conscious, ''I've been criticized for making the women in my books subsidiary to the men. It was true enough. Perhaps my female characters have been too domestic, too adorable and too much what men wished them to be.'' Would he like to be a woman? He laughed. ''Yes, I would like to investigate being a woman, if at the end of a fixed period I could come back to being a man. I think it is very normal for a male to view women as something other. If you're wired heterosexually, women can be elusive, strange and frightening to a degree. In elementary school I was mingled in with these female creatures alphabetically. They were full of menace and magic and strangeness.'' His novel and witchcraft, he said, are both about female power, a power that patriarchal societies have denied while they try to retain the ''wonderful male power'' of killing people. ''The Witches of Eastwick,'' in which nature appears busier killing than birthing, is also ''about all of us and nature.

We are part of the animal kingdom. I watch these films on television about nature, and all you see is animals pouncing on each other.'' At the novel's end, the three witches pounce on marriage as the solution to their difficulties. This may seem less like witchcraft than that old fictional magic. For him, Mr. Updike said, ''the marriages are an ending to my book. Who knows what's going to happen? That's three other novels.'' - Andrea Stevens John Updike: His novels were 'a time capsule' of his era - USATODAY.com John Updike: His novels were 'a time capsule' of his era Updated Enlarge Random House Says longtime editor Judith Jones: "John Updike's novels are like a time capsule of the last 50 years what we were as a people, a society, a country." Updike died Tuesday of lung cancer. By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY John Updike, 76, who wrote gracefully and prolifically about sex, religion and art — "the three great secret things in human experience," as he called them — died Tuesday at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Knopf, his publisher for 50 years, said Updike died after a battle with lung cancer. Judith Jones, his longtime editor, said he was diagnosed after Thanksgiving. MORE: The essential John Updike For his best-selling novels, including Couples (1968) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Updike was celebrated as a chronicler of suburban adultery — "a subject," he wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." His most famous fictional character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, was a basketball star who peaked in high school. He was featured in four novels, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize: Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). The four novels, published between 1960 and 1990, trace the life and death of a middle-class suburban male, a "beautiful brainless guy," as Updike put it. Angstrom could be unlikable and selfish, but millions of readers found him to be an extraordinarily accurate mirror of the anxieties of 20th-century America and its obsession with sports.

Updike wrote 61 books, including 23 novels, and was a short-story writer, poet, essayist, and art and book critic. He was always the polished stylist, whether he was writing about baseball great Ted Williams' last game for the Boston Red Sox in 1960, or reviewing Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy, two months ago in The New Yorker. "He had an eye for detail that would bring alive a period in time," says Jones, who edited more of his books than she can count. "John Updike's novels are like a time capsule of the last 50 years — what we were as a people, a society, a country." As a literary celebrity, Updike, who once wrote that "Fame is a mask that eats into the face," twice made the cover of Time magazine.

In 1968, when Couples was published, the headline read: "The Adulterous Society." In 1982, the headline about Updike said: "Going Great at 50." In 2006, when Time interviewed him about Terrorist, his novel about a Muslim high school student in New Jersey recruited to be suicide bomber, Updike didn't make the cover. But if he had, he joked that the headline would have read, "Still Alive, Amazingly!" or, "Still Alive — And Why?" 'Couples' still shocks Time's Lev Grossman tells USA TODAY that interviewing Updike "was an astounding experience. The sentences that came out of his mouth off-the-cuff most people couldn't produce on the page with years of revisions." But did Updike remain relevant in the 21st century? "I think that was very much on his mind," Grossman says. "He talked about that a lot. You could tell he was turning it over in his mind, the question of what he was still doing producing books. "There's no question he made a lot of false starts in his final decades. There were a lot of experiments that were not terribly successful.

For example, Toward the End of Time, his science-fiction novel which was a lightweight affair." But, Grossman adds, "Couples stands out as an astoundingly vivid and dangerous book about sex. The idea that people think Desperate Housewives is new and edgy — it was all there. And the fact that a book like that can shock 40 years after it's published. You won't believe how far he goes." But he also had his critics, including the late novelist David Foster Wallace, who considered Updike (along with Philip Roth and Norman Mailer) "G.M.N.s" (Great Male Narcissists). Others contended that Updike wrote beautifully — about not very much. To which, he said, "There is a good deal to be said about almost anything. …My subject is the American small-town, Protestant middle-class. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules." But if critics may debate his strengths as novelist, he had no rival if there were a literary award for charm and self-deprecating humor.

Updike called himself a "kind of blue-collar guy who lucked out and became a writer." Struggles as a child He was born on March 18, 1932, in the midst of the Depression, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in nearby Shillington as the only son of "penny-pinching parents." His father was a science teacher. His mother was interested in writing and would eventually publish two works of fiction. As a child, he struggled with a stammer. He later wrote about his lifelong battle with psoriasis, as well as his bad teeth. There may have been no topic he could not write about with elegance and wit. After attending Harvard on an academic scholarship and art school in England, he began writing for The New Yorker in 1954, after being recruited by the famed E.B. White. By the magazine's count, Updike contributed 862 pieces, including 154 poems, 170 short stories and 327 book reviews.

New Yorker editor David Remnick said in a statement: "Even though his literary career transcended any magazine — he was obviously among the very best writers in the world — he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young. …I never stopped thinking what he would think of what we were doing." He may have been a New Yorker writer, but in 1957, Updike moved from Manhattan, fleeing what he called its "cultural hassle." He settled in the Boston suburbs with his first wife, Mary Pennington, and their four children. (He was divorced in 1976; a year later, he married Martha Bernard.) In his fiction, he periodically ventured into territory different from his usual Massachusetts or Pennsylvania settings. The Coup (1978) dealt with an imaginary African country called Kush. He wrote about South America in Brazil (1994). He never won the Nobel Prize for literature, but one of his fictional characters did — a cranky Jewish writer named Henry Bech, whom he featured in three novels, starting with Bech, a Book (1970).

As he grew older, Updike wrote more about religion, faith and God in novels such as Roger's Version (1986).He also examined the world of the occult, albeit in a lighthearted manner, with The Witches of Eastwick (1984), about three women who turn to devil worship after their marriages break down. The 1987 film adaptation starred Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon. But as Updike told USA TODAY last year: "It had a beautiful cast but intruded on the world of the witches. It became Nicholson's movie and dissolved into special effects." The movie also omitted a key part of the 1984 novel: how another woman dies after being cursed by the witches. That death, Updike said, left a "residual sense of guilt" for one of the witches, which Updike explored in a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, published in October. It was the last book published during his lifetime. In it, the widows lament old age. One fears, "the cells of my body are getting impatient with me.

They're bored with housing my spirit." Another says, "We're ancient." Asked if he felt ancient, Updike laughed and said, "I'm an innocent. I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror." Knopf plans to publish two more books by Updike: My Father's Tears and Other Stories, his first collection of new short fiction since 2000, in June, and Endpoint, a poetry collection, in the fall. Contributing: Deirdre Donahue and Carol Memmott Posted E-mail | Print | To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones . For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com . Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more .

Question: Who wrote the 1984 novel ‘The Witches of Eastwick’?
Answer: John Updike