CHARMED AGAIN JOHN UPDIKE'S SEQUEL TO THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 2, 2008 | by BRIAN MORTON

THE death of Satan was, as Wallace Stevens put it, a tragedy for the imagination. The retreat of sin - as both act and concept - represents a practical problem for a novelist of John Updike's stamp. But how brilliantly, even defiantly, he deals with both losses in his latest book, The Widows Of Eastwick. The title apart, and even allowing for an introductory paragraph cast in the deceptively gentle measures of a Salem witch report, this doesn't at fi rst read very much like a sequel at all, and that's where its cleverness lies.

We regularly turn on Hollywood for its lack of imagination and formulaic approach to character and plot, its obsession with "franchises" such as Indiana Jones and less human heroes, but we tend to forget that it was novelists - and literary novelists at that - who set the ball rolling.

Norman Mailer sustained a franchise character - himself - across several books. Joseph Heller even delivered the long-denied "Catch- 23". But it was Updike who saw the potential in having a single character - or two, if you count Henry Bech - refl ect his country's hopes and woes across several books and several decades.

He introduced "Rabbit" Angstrom - large, hapless and horny - in 1960, on the cusp of the decade whose sexual mores Updike would virtually patent, and returned to him every 10 years, following Rabbit, Run with Rabbit Redux in 1971, and Rabbit Is Rich in 1981. In 1985, Playboy magazine ran a spoof Books Of The (Following) Year feature which reviewed an imaginary Updike called Rabbit Is Old, in which the dotard runs off with yet another young girl, can't get it up, wanders off from a motel room in the middle of the night, and is brought home by the police, meek and incontinent.

Updike, of course, had the last laugh with Rabbit At Rest and Rabbit Remembered, the latter ushering the concept into not just a new decade but the new millennium, a click of the calendar which might actually mean something to a writer of his religious temper.

Playboy thought of Updike as one of its own, chronicler of the "postpill paradise" celebrated/satirised in Couples, and always good for a few graphic blow jobs and orgasms.

In 1984, the year before that affectionate spoof, Updike published The Witches Of Eastwick. It divided his fans, but also earned him fresh brickbats. There was a pre-Potter shiver over the witchcraft content.

Feminists declared it misogynistic, reducing female powers to mere spells and imprecations. Supporters pointed out that it was the first time Updike had bothered to develop his female characters. Detractors quickly replied that while Alexandra, Jane and Sukie were nicely, uh, rounded (in both the Hugh Hefner and the lit crit sense), they were portrayed as in thrall to Darryl Van Horne, who was the story's very Devil.

The Rabbit books came along frequently enough to maintain a certain continuity. The Bech books stretched the chronology a little more. But there has been a gap of nearly a quarter of a century between The Witches . . . and The Widows Of Eastwick. In between, there has been a gruesomely bad film adaptation - with Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson as the Devil - but also a successful stage musical and a television pilot, which apparently bombed on the difficulty of blending Bewitched and Desperate Housewives with elements of The Amityville Horror. Long enough - and the distractions not memorable enough - to forget much of what The Witches Of Eastwick was about.

The three women have nascent magical powers, which Darryl helps them harness and deploy. He seduces all three in turn, but marries their mild friend Jenny. In revenge, the witches hex her and she dies of cancer. Darryl flees Eastwick with Jenny's brother Chris, who seems to be his lover.

Twenty-four years later, in The Widows Of Eastwick, the women are scattered across America, married and widowed. Escaping New Mexico, Lexa takes a trip to the Rockies, then re-establishes contact with Jane and they visit the Sphinx and pyramids of Egypt. Further on, Sukie rejoins the circle, and they go trois to China.

There's an inordinate amount of touristic and cultural detail in this opening section, a third of the book apparently thrown away on verbatim tour-guide lectures and old-ladyish gripes about foreign sanitation and randy widowers, or apparently randy widowers whose absent partners are "he" rather than "she".

It seems like a waste of narrative space, but Updike knows what he's about. There's a need to establish that the women who screwed and flew about Eastwick (only one had the actual power of flight) are now old ladies, losing interest in, or opportunity for, sex; Sukie excepted. There's an opportunity to establish that they also killed in Eastwick and to set up a certain logic of guilt. There is also an opportunity to explore loneliness, human smallness in nature (Canada), cults of death (Egypt), human smallness in the crowd and the loneliness of exceptional beings in uniform societies (China). In addition, all this detail about place leads teasingly on to an inevitable return to Eastwick.