By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Updike, John. The Witches of Eastwick. Ballantine Books: August 27, 1996. 320 pages. ISBN: 978-0449912102

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike differs in many ways from its most recent TV adaptation, the 1980s movie and the musical. It simultaneously presents its women as more and less powerful than its adaptations. It also has a mean streak that is not apparent in any of its screen portrayals. Simply put, the women in Updike’s book are more bitchy than witchy. Sounds awful, but then the characters are a piece of work.

Unlike the movie and the TV show Eastwick, which have the women discovering their powers at the beginning of the story and then meeting the mysterious Darryl Van Horne, the witches in the novel have had their powers for a long time. After they were been divorced or abandoned, the lack of a husband propelled these women to magic.

But even if they can control the weather or make functional voodoo dolls, the women behave like teenagers as soon as Van Horne walks in. The witches have slept with every married man around town and Van Horne is an interesting novelty, a rich man who may drive the tedium of their lives away.

The problem? Their lives are tedious because they want them to be tedious. Their lack of imagination, mediocrity, and idle tempers, which propel them to spend their time gossiping about the wives of the men they sleep with, are to blame. Yes, the witches are more dangerous and more powerful than the ones in the movie (they seem to be under the control of Jack Nicholson throughout the film), but so what? They’re not any more interesting for all their nastiness.

Darryl Van Horne, in the book, is a bit of a letdown. He’s certainly not the Devil, but a bumbling buffoon who dazzles the women with hot tubs, orgies and tennis courts. In the end, when he is proven to be a fraud and a homosexual (more on this point later), it becomes painfully obvious that only a trio of desperate, dumb witches would have taken him for anything special or worth squabbling over.

At least in Eastwick, Van Horne is good-looking, sophisticated and filthy rich. There’s a reason why the three protagonists might come to blows over him. In the novel? Not so much, and yet these women eventually murder poor Jenny Gabriel over him.

The movie skipped the Jenny bit, probably guessing that it would cast its characters in an unflattering light, but it did add the very nasty cherry-pit scene which has Jack Nicholson – not the witches – as the primary source of power and evil. Not so in the book.

Jenny and her brother Chris arrive in Eastwick after the death of their parents (an event partly inspired by one of the witches). Soon, Van Horne has married Jenny and the witches give the younger woman cancer in revenge.

Jenny and Chris could be good foils to the witches: a mirror to them. But we get to know so little about Jenny, even less about Chris, that it doesn’t work. Jenny is merely a sketch, a shell of a character, and I never understood why she would marry Van Horne in the first place (there’s some talk about her needing to hug someone, but it doesn’t seem terribly realistic considering how entirely unappealing Van Horne is).

At the end of the novel, we learn that Van Horne was a fraud, that he probably married Jenny for her inheritance money, that he manipulated the witches into killing Jenny, and that he was really homosexual (he runs away with Chris). All of which is highly unrealistic. Why did Van Horne even bother associating with the witches for ¾ of the novel if all he wanted was some man-candy? Perhaps he merely desired to cause some mayhem or wanted to use the witches’ power for his own purposes, but what purposes? Aside from some half-baked science experiments, Van Horne doesn’t seem to have any goals. In the movie adaptation, there was a tangible objective: offspring. The book does not offer any explanations. Repetitive sessions of sex and tennis blur into each other.

While it does paint a sardonic, well-delivered picture of the hell-hole small-town life can be, the whole thing gets dull quickly.

So, pros of the novel: it delivers female characters that are far more powerful and more independent than in the movie and TV show (witness the nurse and her evil husband in Eastwick). It presents witchcraft as an important, possibly dangerous, female occupation instead of a harmless hobby. But the ride that the women take us on is ultimately frustrating, and despite some exquisite descriptions, it’s a bore. It’s Desperate Housewives with too much emphasis on the “desperate”, Sex and the City if Mr.Big were a gross dude, and empowerment if empowerment means having lots of sex with a bunch of losers. Even worse, at the end of the novel the witches decide to remarry and forfeit their powers in the process, even though, throughout the book they have sternly declared how lousy marriage was for them.

“But it’s John Updike!” you might say. Yeah, nice prose. But at the end of it, I felt like talking to the book as though I were Rhett Butler: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

On the other hand, the movie adaptation was pretty damned bad, with Nicholson hamming it up, so I’d recommend picking the book instead of the DVD.

You can buy The Witches of Eastwick through Amazon.com

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