The Witches of Eastwick

A good book for me is something which I'll read even though I know what the plot is (I'm not looking at you Harry Potter). It may be that the prose is excellent, weaving vivid imagery into every page, making every place, every character come alive with mere words. It may be that while the prose is dull, the philosophy behind the story is deep and resounding. Some examples of such books for me are Frank Herbert's Dune, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Edgar Allan Poe's works, and now, recently read, John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick.

The novel is about three witches living in a backwater town called Eastwick, somewhere in Rhode Island. Alexandra (a sculptress who can summon thunderstorms), Jane (a musician who can fly), and Sukie (a gossip columnist who can turn milk into cream) were tight friends until a strange and utterly despicable man named Darryl Van Horne came to town, occupying an old mansion surrounded by marsh. Predictably, all three of them fell in love with clumsy and extravagant Darryl even while keeping their affairs with married men and their friendship still.

How? Every Thursday they'd drive to the mansion to soak in a hot tub, the three witches and Van Horne, and have a foursome later. These lovely Thursday afternoons were shattered when Jenny, the daughter of Sukie's former lover who killed his wife with a poker and hung himself afterwards, came to town. Eventually Van Horne married her which incurred the wrath of the three witches. They gave her cancer. She died within a year.

So here's the twist: after his wife's death, Van Horne run off with her brother, Cris. Turned out he was gay and married Jenny just so he could be with her brother. He left three disillusioned witches and a mountain of debt. The witches eventually moved on with their lives and out of town with new husbands.

I found the book boring at times, but that's only because I was hurrying it—I mean I wanted to finish H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unkown Kaddath before I started studying for Microeconomics (300+ pages yiha). Anyway, The Witches of Eastwick requires a certain mood, a mood to sympathize. The growth of the three witches did not happen in spurts; Updike did it in a grinding slowness, painstakingly explaining how they came to be—divorced, promiscuous, selfish, semi-cruel. The novel has a lot of sexual content and choice profanity (Daryl: I always like a little pussy after lunch) so I wouldn't say it's reading for the close-minded prude who could not appreciate delicious scandal. Anyway, some quotes:

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. 

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.

Men are such cocksuckers aren't they? You don't have to answer that. It's true. They're scared. Their dicks get limp when confronted by a woman of obvious power and what do they do about it? Call them witches, burn them, torture them, until every woman is afraid. Afraid of herself… afraid of men… and all for what? Fear of losing their hard-on. 

Yay big hair! 

The novel was highly acclaimed when it came out in 1983, staying in the New York Time's bestseller list for months. Three years later, the novel was made into a movie of the same title starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon as the three witches and Jack Nicholson as Darryl Van Horne. I remember watching it when I was tons younger—I've always been fascinated with witches. If all goes well, the next 'book review' would be Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.