Just starting the Witches of Eastwick by John Updike.
John Updike astutely recognizes the modern American suburb, with its hypocritical social mores and superstitions, as a rich literary setting. Into this milieu he introduces the fantastical and invents a tale of what life would be like for three divorced and bored housewives, who happen to be witches, living in such a place -- the fictitious Eastwick, Rhode Island -- in the late 1960's. It's like Updike is channeling Nathaniel Hawthorne through "Rabbit Redux."
The women are Alexandra Spofford, a sculptress, Jane Smart, a cellist, and Sukie Rougemont, the local gossip columnist. They drink a lot, neglect their kids, have sex with married men, and cast spells to torment their enemies, who are usually their lovers' wives; they have the traditional witchlike manners of being vindictive, temperamental, and spiteful. They've never desired a man in common until they meet a vaguely devilish fellow named Darryl Van Horne who has bought an old mansion on the outskirts of town. Van Horne is quite mysterious: He's a Manhattanite, a pianist, a collector of tacky nouveau art, and a renegade scientist, trying to discover impossibly efficient methods of generating electricity. He takes an interest in Alexandra's crude little sculptures, accompanies Jane in some sonatas, and encourages Sukie to write novels. He invites them to play tennis (where their magic lends itself to some creative cheating) and partake of the orgiastic pleasures of his hot tub.
The witches' auras induce strange and tragic effects on the lives of their lovers. Ed Parsley, the Unitarian minister, runs off to join the anti-war movement, leaving his churlish wife Brenda to take over the pulpit. Clyde Gabriel, the editor of Sukie's newspaper, is stuck with a gabby wife who gets her satisfaction from finding fault with everything. But it's the Gabriels' adult daughter Jenny that serves to drive a wedge between the witches and Van Horne. When Jenny shows up in town from Chicago, Sukie takes pity on the seemingly pathetic girl and invites her to join the "coven" at Van Horne's mansion. Jenny attracts Van Horne's amorous attentions, but his intentions, it turns out, confound even the witches' intuition.
Popular culture has interpreted the witch mystique as a form of feminine self-empowerment -- women willing themselves to be able to act in retribution or defense against men's hurtful actions -- so it makes sense that the witches in the novel imply that witchcraft is an untapped power all women have, particularly those who have been hurt by or are unhappy with the men in their lives. And it makes sense for Updike to have set the novel in the era of the Women's Movement of the 1960's, where witchcraft would have shed a new, different light on liberation. Are the witches of Eastwick liberated? Probably so, but it's too bad they're so miserable nonetheless.
