The Witches of Eastwick

What the Book Does

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike is a work of literary fiction, magical realism that three divorced women in a small Rhode Island town have acquired magical powers. When the mysterious Darryl Van Horne arrives, he disrupts their coven. A satirical novel about female power, desire, and the anxieties of the 1960s sexual revolution, told with Updike’s characteristic density of observation.. Updike’s most satirical long novel — the magical realism elements are deployed lightly, and the real subject is the social and sexual politics of small-town New England in the late 1960s. More playful than the Rabbit novels, and more consciously aware of its own politics.

Particular Strengths

The qualities that distinguish this book from others covering similar ground: The prose is quintessential Updike — dense with sensory observation; The satire of small-town social life is precise and funny; and The three women are more fully rendered than Updike’s female characters typically are. These are not incidental features but the product of John Updike’s specific approach to the subject.

The Central Arguments

The book’s core intellectual contributions can be summarised as follows. Female power — including magical power — is portrayed in the novel as both real and ultimately insufficient against the forces of convention and male disruption. The 1960s sexual revolution produced its own forms of conformity and constraint — the novel satirises these as much as the conservative society that preceded them. Updike’s prose renders the natural world of New England — seasons, light, landscape — with his characteristic and distinctive density. These ideas are developed with evidence and example rather than assertion, which is what makes the book worth reading rather than merely skimming.

The Writing

John Updike’s prose in The Witches of Eastwick reflects a writer who has thought hard about how to make difficult material legible without sacrificing precision. The structure is clear and the arguments are built incrementally, giving the reader time to absorb each point before the next develops. This is non-fiction that earns its conclusions rather than asserting them.

Limitations

The book is not without weaknesses. The male gaze is inescapable — Updike’s prose renders the women through a lens they would not choose. Darryl Van Horne is more symbol than character. These are minor qualifications rather than fundamental criticisms.

Who This Is For

Readers of Updike’s other work — best approached with some familiarity with his style and its limitations.

Updike, the Film, and the Controversy

The Witches of Eastwick (1984) is among the most widely known of John Updike’s novels, in no small part because of the popular 1987 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson as the diabolical Darryl Van Horne opposite Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the three witches — a glossy, broad comedy that diverged considerably from the book’s darker, more satirical tone. Updike himself returned to the characters decades later with a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), revisiting the women in old age. The novel has always attracted argument: some readers find its rendering of female power and sexuality through Updike’s famously male gaze to be exactly the misogyny it appears to critique, while others read it as a knowing satire of both the conservative society it depicts and the supposed liberations of the 1960s. That ambiguity is part of what keeps it discussed.

Where It Sits in Updike’s Career

Updike was one of the towering figures of postwar American letters — a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner best known for the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy that chronicled middle-class American life across four decades. The Witches of Eastwick is one of his more playful and overtly satirical works, trading the realist register of the Rabbit novels for magical realism and broad social comedy, though it retains his hallmark density of sensory observation and his preoccupation with sex, suburbia, and spiritual restlessness. For readers new to Updike, it is not necessarily the best starting point — that is Rabbit, Run — but it is among his most accessible and entertaining novels, and a fascinating, divisive document of how a major male novelist of his generation grappled with female power and the legacy of the sexual revolution. Approached with awareness of its perspective and its limitations, it remains a sharp, funny, and stylistically rich entertainment. The three witches — Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie — discover that their powers blossom precisely because they have shed husbands and conventional roles, and the novel’s most interesting current is its suggestion that freedom, desire, and creative power are bound together for women in ways midcentury New England could neither accommodate nor forgive. Whether one reads the book as complicit in or critical of the male gaze it deploys, it remains a fascinating, provocative artifact of a major novelist grappling with the unfinished business of the sexual revolution, and its blend of social comedy, supernatural mischief, and lush prose continues to reward readers willing to engage it on its own complicated terms. Few novels of its era so vividly capture both the giddy possibilities and the disappointments of a particular American moment, and fewer still do so with such stylistic richness, which is why it endures as one of Updike’s most read and most debated works.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Updike’s most satirical long novel — the magical realism elements are deployed lightly, and the real subject is the social and sexual politics of small-town New England in the late 1960s. More playful than the Rabbit novels, and more consciously aware of its own politics.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with John Updike