“God, make me chaste-but not yet.”
Saint Augustine
Updike is unfairly maligned as an author. As David Foster Wallace said in his brutal put-down, the critical readership of John's output tends to dismiss him as a penile thesaurus. It doesn't help that one of his best books, The Witches of Eastwick, is marketed as some kind of smirking takedown of his most ardent feminist critics. I would posit this reading, like most surface level interpretations of great works of fiction, is both highly motivated and deeply wrong. The Witches of Eastwick is a novel about the same things that Updike always handles with such aplomb, namely the breakdown of religion and the Freudian roots of middle-class dysfunction.
It's New England in a time after the sixties. The Vietnam war is raging and everyone, including the most shrieking of village harpies, has a moronic opinion on that pig fuck war. The smug, preening unitarian "minister" is giving them a platform, mostly so he can screw his parishioner wives (that's what you get for hanging with the free love preacher; the love tends to get spread). Alexander, Jane, and Sukie are a coven of witches that live in the sleepy town of Eastwick. Each one is divorced, and each one is practicing their witchery ways on the unsuspecting population. Updike parodies Marquez's magic realism by showing the witches to be truly magic, and treating it like a simple fact of the world, passing largely without comment even as they (the witches) cause natural disasters, defy the laws of physics during a sexually charged game of tennis, and on one particularly nasty occasion give their romantic rival a virulent form of cancer and cause her to die a horrible death while their jilted lover watches on helpless. Spousal homicide is the order of the day, as the best written and by far most disturbing section of the book shows Sukie's lover driven to murder his wife and hang himself in the flaming wreckage of his house. Also, it's a comedy. A comedy of the blackest, most horrible sort, but a comedy nonetheless.
Updike is a master of understated irony. His narrative voice has a feminine, almost bitchy undertone to it. He manically catalogs in beautiful detail the effects of aging on each of the witches, the realities of their lives post divorce, the paucity of their relationships and almost accidentally deconstructs the sexual revolution and the girl power tropes that it spawned. On paper, the witches are poster children for sexual liberation. Each one is divorced. The divorces were usually because their man was no longer appealing to them. Not to mention the classic Updike infidelity. They wanted more out of life, as they repeatedly suggest, and find their own happiness, mostly by creating their coven of three. Alexander, Sukie, and Jane against the world. They also have a habit of sharing lovers. Alexander slept with Sukie's husband, and Jane flirted with Alexander's. She may have fucked him after the divorce, but she pretends to be the most sexually repressed (while in fact she is the most depraved) and won't say. They meet once a week for drinks they mostly can't afford and discuss their various sexual conquests, their lives post-divorce, and their children. Just kidding, of course. Like most girlbosses, they barely acknowledge their children or their current partners. Alexander is sleeping with a married plumber and father of four. Sukie is sleeping with the soon to be wife murderer, and Jane is pining for the very married principal of the school she teaches music at. Already, Updike makes a pretty interesting point, and one that people tend to find uncomfortable; In a world where free love is an accepted norm and marriage is a social contract, what defense is there against marital infidelity that doesn't come off as hopelessly prudish? The witches certainly see no issue with their dalliances and hold their lovers' wives in contempt. "Treat your man right, and he won't come to me anyway," is the prevailing sentiment. Besides, breaking contracts, particularly the increasingly de-sacrified marriage rite, is so deliciously intense, and the real consequences are so minimal. Birth control and abortion remove the risk of conception, and the unitarian preacher is too busy cheating on his own wife to comment (Actually, each witch slept with him at one point or another out of sheer curiosity, and he's been mooning after them ever since). Who cares? What's the harm in a little sinful fun?
Enter, the man of the hour, Darryl Van Horne. A New York mogul, a mad scientist with hairy hands and a sexual appetite like a prize stallion, he causes ripples in Eastwick when he buys a decrypt mansion and starts fixing it up to be his home away from home in the country, where he can conduct his experiments in peace. The witches each find themselves drawn to him, one after another, until they end up in his home, then later his spa, then his bedroom. All three at once, naturally. It becomes a weekly thing, gradually taking on a life of its own. Van Horne isn't anything like the other men of Eastwick. Fantastically rich, rampantly self-assured, the type of dude with the audacity to suggest a magic harem-orgy without irony, as if it is the most normal thing in the world. The witches initially view it as a bit of harmless fun to share this lover all at once instead of waiting turns, and it doesn't hurt Van Horne has this way of making each one believe that they are the favorite. Alexandra is the witch with the biggest personality and the most power, so she assumes that she is the most loved. Sukie is the youngest and the prettiest. Elizabeth makes up for her mousey appearance and relative magical weakness by being a kinky minx and having a no holes barred approach to lovemaking, if you'll forgive the pun. So each one comes to the reasonable conclusion that Van Horne is just a horny devil, a man living the sexual dream, but he must have a special place in his heart for them. And he does. It's just that, like the man said, there is always a bigger fish. Like Jenny, the daughter of the wife-murderer, nineteen years old and back from college. And who would meet her other than Darryl Van Horne, out for a spin. Shockingly, a man seemingly allergic to monogamy decides that this girl is the one he has been waiting for all his life. After all, she has something all the witches just don't have; a sexual history that doesn't resemble an explosion in the STI factory and doesn't carry with her the baggage of a lifetime of exploration.
So, what's a witch to do? Concede that a younger, prettier woman won the race they totally weren't running and leave with their dignity intact? Don't be ridiculous. They cast a spell on Jenny. That's what witches do. They've been shown to prank their romantic rivals before, like causing wardrobe malfunctions during the most strident speech in their local church to make the neighborhood wives look dumb and sanctimonious, or causing one particularly odious woman to spit up crow feathers while she rambles on about just how much the war in Vietnam bothers her deeply and how nobody really cares the way she does and isn't she just so noble and put upon (this is the woman that is later murdered with a poker and the genius of Updike has you almost rooting for it) or maybe something really over-the-line like throwing a couple of storms her way? Actually, the witches decide that the only reasonable solution to their favorite dildo being stolen out from under them is to give Jenny a malignant form of ovarian cancer. Jenny dies horribly, in immense pain, while Van Horne holds her hand and curses the witches. He moves out of Eastwick as soon as he can, as do the other witches over the next decade, straggling out of a town robbed of its beauty, in some intangible sense darker and harder for having known them at all.
I get that it sounds about as funny as a heart attack. Cancer isn't funny, unless it's clown-penis cancer. And this book sounds like a cruel parody of women. The sniping, the backbiting, the truly abhorrent finale to their torrid love affair. It's gnarly. It's depressing. It also raises some important questions about the nature of our society after the sexual revolution. What exactly does a healthy sex life look like, and why is infidelity so ubiquitous, even being as clearly destructive as it is? What is one to do with the sexually disenfranchised? Finally, is the sexual revolution as positive for women as the magazines and other women might have one believe? The culture seems to be increasingly asking, and Updike made a persuasive, yet deeply hypocritical argument that sleeping around is neither some kind of depressive cure-all nor anything approaching a way to organize a fulfilling life. Most of the time, the adulterous impulse is borne of a profound ennui matched with a spiritual listlessness.
Christianity in Updike is a tepid affair. He was a lifelong Episcopal, one deeply influenced by Soren Kierkegaard with regards to his views on the nature of faith as an existential statement, a view created largely in response to the rise and dominance of continental philosophy. Kierkegaard agrees with Kant and Hegel that pure reason is both paradoxically unreasonable and a poor substitute for God in a fallen world. His solution to this quandary is simple: Hegel and Kant both still make the fundamental error that God is something that can be reasoned with or understood at all. Why would someone who takes the idea of God seriously even think it could be possible without His help? Ask and ye shall receive, knock and the door will open. Faith is answering the call, not waiting for a sign. Signs come to those that seek, and those that walk with God will find him. Fear and Trembling lays out his understanding of faith, and it is as profound a little book as one is likely to read. Updike's characters, particularly his most famous character, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, have this childlike faith that Christ loves them and everything will be made right in the end. It's a deeply comforting view. I even admit some jealousy. I wish I could subscribe to similar thinking. However, one hardly needs to be some kind of biblical scholar to know that if Christ had no time for any sin in particular, it was adultery. As much as He rails against divorce, he is always clear to reiterate that there is one exception to the irrevocable nature of marriage and it is in the case of an adulterous woman. The woman caught in the act is to be divorced. And it's not hard to imagine that He would take a dim view of the shenanigans of the various witches, what with all the adultery and murder going on in a sleepy New England town.
Why the sermon? Because it's important to understand the message. The feminist critics claiming this book is some kind of anti-woman screed either haven't read it or are aggressively misunderstanding the point. The witches, despite all their supernatural power, are still only human, and humans that are in the process of re-inventing their own values, even as they contradict nature at every point. Dostoevsky's protagonist's struggle against the archaic moral codes of the Russian Orthodox Church, while the witches rebel against the stuffy, quasi-puritan morals of the Upper-Class New-Englanders. Both end up facing the grim realities of human nature. The witches, for example, love both the magical and sexual power they hold. They abuse it at the drop of the hat. They are disconnected from the dangers of fertility and, by hook and crook, lead men astray with impunity. Men compete with men for women, women compete with women for male attention. The irony is that the men are self-aware enough to admit that they are competing and they are deeply territorial, while this basic reality is often ignored or obfuscated among women. But with sexual freedom comes a rejection of possession, and fundamental of jealousy, of that basic human awareness that 'to love and to hold' means not just to have to but possess exclusively. When the witches are sleeping with married men, they risk nothing, not even their pride. They have no claim on these men and no reputation to save in Eastwick. But Darryl Van Horne is a true prize, one that each of the witches wants exclusively, even though all are too prideful to admit to it. Of course, Van Horne is playing his own game, and one with very different rules. He, too, embraces the sexual revolution. He also feels that sex has been decoupled from intimacy and that exclusive ownership is the sentiment borne of simple insecurity. Until he discovers that even his harem has limits to what it can tolerate, and it certainly cannot countenance the inclusion of a younger, hotter, and more easily moldable member to its ranks. Ironically, the witches never really understand that Van Horne just doesn't care that they are superpowered baddies with powers beyond his mortal ken. Van Horne only ever liked them because they fulfilled his stallion fantasy, but fantasies are temporary. They can't give him what he wants in a long-term partner, namely youthful beauty and the kind of love that is the product of naivete and hero-worship. Sleazy? Totally. Borderline nausea-inducing. But not inaccurate to the way a serial non-monogamist operates.
Updike is hardly some traditionalist shaking his fist at all the kids indulging in a bit of drugs and sex and rock and roll. He is profound in his awareness of how men and women exploit each other, how sexuality can be just as virulent a force as physical violence, and just how much of sex is tied up in the involutions of the human ego. It's nearly as profound a study of sexual jealousy as you might find in Proust, although with a much harsher edge to it. The witches are chewed up and spat out by their own sexuality, and their only recourse is to kill the next generation. Despite how dark the conclusion it reaches, the novel manages to be very funny at times. The witches sniping at one another while smiling wide is comedy gold. And the characters in this book are brilliant. If Updike has one thing to recommend his writings, it has to be just how excellent he is at characterization. The witches never stop being likable until they cross the line, and Van Horne is great fun.
In conclusion, if you are considering polyamory, don't. If the magic women couldn't make it work, you've got no shot. Read the book too.
Not only do I fully agree, but I add this: _The Centaur_ is a wow as is his memoir _Self-Consciousness--and virtually all else, including the poetry. Similarly, Roth was too often taken down as mysogynist. I argue that _The Dying Animal_, takedown by Kakutani of the NYTimes, is a brilliant view from a man's point ol view and I think Roth knew exactly what he was doing with this male character. What do you think?