It was, she dimly perceived, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. She returned to putting up Mason jars of spaghetti sauce, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her children could consume even if bewitched for a hundred years in an Italian fairy tale, jar upon jar lifted steaming from the white speckled blue boiler on the trembling, singing round wire rack.

This novel is not horror or fantasy fiction in any reliable way and not particularly paranormal, though Lexa can alter the weather and will her enemies into acts of bad luck.

They're not independent enough to see through Van Horne's wealth or have the self-respect to reject his mansplaining (Don Draper would approve of Van Horne's opinions on gender studies).

Their development hinges on their relationship to various men. This novel is not progressive in its portrayal of liberated women, with Van Horne breaking up the Thursday coven meetings the three women hold weekly. Let me start with what this novel is not. They're each repulsed by Van Horne, the swarthy, super rich New Yorker, but all attracted to him as well. Artisan, musician and writer, the witches of Eastwick are less committed to their craft-creative craft or witch craft, of which Lexa seems the most talented-as much as they're casting for their next male conquest. Set in the late 1960s-where there is no love lost between the author and those kids growing their hair long, protesting the war and listening to those damn Beatles records-the title characters are Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart and Sukie Rougemont, divorcees or widows who've all shacked up with seemingly every able bodied man in Eastwick. Of the 1,000 approaches to that story, Updike's is so pontifical and pumped up with its own magnificence that it ceases to be ridiculous and just becomes unreadable. Published in 1984, this literature is set in a quaint Rhode Island town (described down to the flowers or carpeting) where three bewitching women (described down to their facial features and dialects) become involved with a brutish bachelor named Darryl Van Horne. My introduction to the fiction of John Updike is The Witches of Eastwick and based on 111 pages, it's going to take Elizabeth Montgomery wiggling her nose for me to pick up one of the author's books again.

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike