Reviews
The New York Times
Sam Tanenhaus
“At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page... The genius inheres in the precise observation, in the equally precise language, but above all in the illusion that the image has been received and processed in real time, when in truth Updike has slowed events to a dreamlike pace and given them a dream’s hyperreality, so that the distinction between the actual and the imagined feels erased.”
24/10/2008
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The Los Angeles Times
Kai Maristed
“Although the present story plays off many themes from the old, and is the richer for it, no worries: Newcomers who missed the pleasure of meeting the witches in their prime will nevertheless feel right at home in the Eastwick, R.I., of roughly today... The travelogues are entertaining essays-in-dialogue, where sharply etched scenery and fact-filled reflections on ancient lives mix with some boisterous, politically incorrect riffing on accents and stereotypes.”
27/10/2008
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
“Philip Roth's standing is currently higher than Updike's... Yet Roth sees sexuality from a narrow range of angles. He struggles to show women except as the objects of desire, and it's impossible to imagine him bringing off a book, like this one and its predecessor, with women's own desires at its centre. The sexual adventures in The Widows of Eastwick are almost entirely in the past, but the memories are luminous, and it's an extraordinary achievement to show men, and their little sexualities, as if from outside.”
02/11/2008
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The Daily Express
Roger Lewis
“Updike loves describing the warts and scars, liver spots and patches of crinkled and crêpey skin, “the varicose veins and arthritic deformations” that now beset his heroines. For if The Widows Of Eastwick has a theme, it is that change is hardly for the better, beauty is transformed into ugliness and Nature, on your side when you bloomed, is now the enemy, mercilessly mobilising illness and disease... Eastwick’s weird sisters deserve to go on more of an angry rampage than Updike permits them here. It occurs to me that the author might be frightened of the potential of his own characters.”
17/11/2008
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The Financial Times
Germaine Greer
“Updike is a better writer now than he was in 1984, but he has lost interest in invention...The plot of The Widows of Eastwick never gets off the ground because he can hardly be bothered to make it happen. What he is enraptured and inspired by are moments of special awareness that have nothing to do with narrative, as when Alexandra returns to New Mexico at the end of the book: "She didn't feel old. She felt like one of those burstingly high thunderheads that don't collapse into rain no matter how high they climb over the mountains."”
25/10/2008
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The Daily Mail
Michael Arditti
“The Widows Of Eastwick is far less focused than its predecessor; the first 150 pages when, first alone and then with her friends, Alexandra travels to Canada, Egypt and China, feel like padding, albeit of the most agreeable kind. Once back in Eastwick and themselves the targets of an avenger, the novel takes fire. Updike writes with brio, and is both funny and touching on the indignities and incapacities of ageing.”
24/10/2008
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“...“The Widows of Eastwick,” while deeply flawed, is a less tendentious, more emotionally credible work than its predecessor. Mr. Updike is less interested here in scoring didactic points against feminism than he is in exploring the wages of time and age shared by men and women alike... It is when Mr. Updike sets aside the magical mumbo jumbo and his petulant remarks about the witches’ decaying bodies that this imperfect novel is at its most powerful.”
19/10/2008
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The Spectator
Justin Cartwright
“As you would expect of Updike, it’s an interesting book, crammed with acute observation of the changes in the texture of American life and culture. It is also, at times uncomfortably, explicit on sex, both present and remembered, and the descriptions of the trials of the elderly, including odours and emissions, are many... Strangely, for so supreme a craftsman, the book is a little unbalanced, too long when it could be brief, and too brief when it could be more detailed.”
29/10/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Caroline Moore
“Coals to cinders: this is a novel about failing powers and the terror of death. At times, sadly, this seems reflected in a slackening in Updike's writing, particularly in the first half of the novel.... too much of this section reads as if lifted wholesale from a rather dull guide-book, with only a flicker or two of Updike's magic (a camel has a 'segmented, velour-soft face') to vivify the prose... Still, Updike is the Master, and no fan of his will want to miss The Widows of Eastwick.”
29/10/2008
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The London Review of Books
James Wolcott
“Here’s my philistine advice, straight from the donkey’s mouth. Skip the first third of the novel, flip to page 121 in the hymnal, and begin there. Because from the first sentence – ‘News that the damnable trio were back in town percolated from ear to ear like rainwater trickling through the tunnels of an ant colony’ – Updike is in his native element, his eye and mind the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear.”
01/01/2009
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
“Like many of his minor works, The Widows of Eastwick lends more weight to the view of him as an almost spookily unreflective channeller and prettifier of baby-boom Americana, with a selectively blind eye to various uglinesses and a sideline in overwritten vagina-descriptions. All the same, whatever you make of his writing style, there's no denying that the facility with which he turns out those lovingly cadenced, alliterative sentences is an awe-inspiring spectacle.”
25/10/2008
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The Independent
Matt Thorne
“While "Witches" was ebullient and exciting, "Widows" is portentous and dull. There is some pleasure in Updike's final twist, which is both outrageous and ridiculous. Having spent much of the book talking about how sex for these women is largely in the past, Updike manages to combine anal sex, facial cum-shots and strap-on dildos into a single scene, as if rewarding himself for getting so far without resorting to his trademark explicitness. But by this point nothing can save the book, which, as a fan of Updike's genre work, it pains me to say is his very worst”
31/10/2008
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The Scotsman
Allan Massie
“The novel begins with Alexandra trying to come to terms with her recent bereavement by taking a package tour from her home in New Mexico to the Canadian Rockies. This is described in considerable, and sadly uninteresting, detail. Perhaps Updike has been to the Rockies himself and didn't want to waste the material. But reading of the trip is like having to look at someone's holiday snaps... [This novel] is poor, garrulous, and with mere flickers of the old seductive talent to remind us that in the Rabbit books Updike did something really original and good.”
18/10/2008
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The Washington Post
Elaine Showalter
“Unfortunately, Updike seems to know very little about the psychology, concerns and behavior of older women. Age has brought these widows neither insight nor humor; they have no feelings for their grandchildren, nor any interest in politics, popular culture or other people's problems. Updike describes them as ancient hags, emphasizing "the wrinkles, the warts and scars, the keratoses and liver spots, the slack muscles and patches of crêpey skin . . . the varicose veins and arthritic deformations with which time had overlaid their old beauty."”
26/10/2008
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Time Out
Brendon Volpe (New York)
“Updike uses the ordeal of each woman to knock us over the head with the novel’s natural system of justice—basically, a nondenominational karma. Reaping what you sow: This is a quaint idea, but in The Widows of Eastwick it seems so inevitable that it diffuses the story’s tension. Despite Updike’s sometimes masterful prose, the sense that his story’s action is merely a servant to a larger, predetermined force is too much to bear.”
15/04/2009
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Standpoint
David Sexton
“"How disfigured is... [Updike's] work is by its puerile misogyny!" the critic James Wood once exclaimed. The Widows of Eastwick is the last place to start contesting that verdict. The entwining of sex and mortality that has always been his stock in trade has here become habitual and tired. Updike has always been overly, eloquently descriptive, but here the pace is leaden and simply getting through the book is hard work, like reading a particularly dull epic poem as a scholarly assignment.”
01/11/2008
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Times Literary Supplement
Sarah Churchwell
“It is not only Updike’s plotting that has stalled; so have his gender politics. If female power in the earlier novel was at once seductive and threatening, here it is just bad... Throughout we are presented with women who greet male bodies with rapture, while feeling disgusted by their own. It is hard to take seriously passages in which a nearly seventy-year-old woman longingly remembers semen, “gobs of it”, “the ambrosial, eggy-tasting food of a savage goddess . . . all over her smeared, dazed face as she crouched there, hungry for more”.”
29/10/2008
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The Sunday Times
Stephen Amidon
“The Widows of Eastwick is a singularly unsuccessful effort. In fact, it is difficult to see the point of the novel at all. Given the feebleness of the magic that they are able to conjure up, Updike's three heroines might as well have been estate agents. While the book's predecessor bristled with wicked action, here almost nothing happens... Enervating nostalgia permeates the novel's Eastwick chapters - it is as if everyone wishes they were back in the prequel, where all the fun is.”
26/10/2008
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