Her recipe called for no onions, two cloves of garlic minced and sautéed for three minutes (no more, no less that was the magic) in heated oil, plenty of sugar to counteract acidity, a single grated carrot, more pepper than salt but the teaspoon of crumbled basil is what catered to virility, and the dash of belladonna provided the release without which virility is merely a murderous congestion.Īlexandra is a middle-aged widow, the matriarch of her coven of two other similarly situated women, and her “magic” is more typically expressed in Updike’s stylized symbolism than in more overt actions of witchcraft.Īll this must be added to her own tomatoes, picked and stored on every window sill these weeks past and now sliced and fed to the blender: ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plants, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. It was, she dimly perceived, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. “She” is Alexandra Spofford, one of the three titular “witches” of Eastwick. 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.

Here’s a taste from the novel’s opening pages. This is what I call a prose novel - something that can be delightful to read for its turns of phrase and picturesque phrasings - but which, in the final analysis, seems to be more about its prose than its plot, pacing, or purpose.

The witches of eastwick updike