Eastwick's coven regroups

FICTION: The Widows of EastwickBy John Updike, Hamish Hamilton, 308pp, £18.99  IT'S BEEN a long time, some three decades for the characters - more like 24 years to be pedantic for his readers - since John Updike first directed his playfully subversive attention on three sexually active divorcees living in the small Rhode Island town of Eastwick.

It was the 1970s; the ladies were colourful and followed their needs, often with men who were married, but not to them. Everything became that bit crazier when a rich eccentric purchased the local abandoned mansion and decided to do some entertaining - the ladies were his chosen guests.

Could be he was the Devil . . . or so some folk suspect, there was a death, and a number of bizarre happenings. It was fairly unsavoury, or so the many rumours maintained and the trio moved away. Updike, the knowing master stylist, possessed of sly wit, a gleeful eye and a bag of tricks had the proverbial ball in The Witches of Eastwick, which has stood the test of time mainly because Updike, one of the shrewdest observers of human nature, writes so well. The most enduring element in his fiction is not the stories, it is the images, the forensic observation, the ability to pinpoint the exact sensation, memory or regret a character is experiencing.

And so, just one year short of a quarter of a century since The Witches of Eastwickwith its theme of sexual politics was published, Updike, at 76 still the brightest boy in the class, has reconstituted the coven. For a narrative stalked by death and remorse, this new novel is darkly funny and sustained by some of the sharpest dialogue Updike has written.

There are moments of black awareness, even tenderness. It also confirms that Updike is a bit like Dickens, the usual rules don't really apply. If not on the same scale as the fabulous Rabbit quartet which concluded so brilliantly with Rabbit at Rest (1990), The Widows of Eastwicksucceeds as a sequel which is relaxed, never slavish though diligently cross referenced to the earlier Eastwick volume.

His anti-heroines have dispersed; new marriages caused them to drift away from each other, "geographically scattered as they were". In the case of Alexandra she has moved to New Mexico, yet the edgy Jane and the gorgeously dangerous, always slightly bonkers Sukie have sustained a tentative contact. The respective deaths of their second husbands eventually draw the women back together.

Old age has struck with some vengeance; there are minor illnesses and increasing doubts. "Alexandra, the oldest in age, the broadest in body, and the nearest in character to normal, generous-spirited humanity, was the first to become a widow." Updike never concealed his fondness for Alexandra. The new novel opens with her trying to make sense of her loss of Jim, a potter; this was the love match for which she had been waiting. Her earlier life in Eastwick had all been in preparation for this relationship.

"People had taken Jim Farlander seriously, women and children especially, giving him back his own poised silence . . . It was in bed she first felt his death coming . . . there was a palpable loosening in the knit of his sinews." The writing is delicate and tender. Updike eases the reader back into the world these women inhabit.

As a solitary old woman, she has become an embarrassment to herself. She sets off on a trip to Canada. During the travel sequence Alexandra dreams about the past. "Rescued from Eastwick, she had resolved to be a good wife. . ." A tone of immense sympathy is quickly established. And once it is, then Updike prepares to have some fun.

It comes in the form of a letter. "Jane Smart's handwriting had always been vehement, gouging the paper, driving itself into slanting lines whose closeness caused loops to entwine and overlap. Jane is now a widow and she not only informs Alexandra of her news, the tone of her communication re-establishes her personality. Updike ensures that the acidic, punning Jane who bitched her way through The Witches of Eastwick has lost none of her fury. The letter also proves prophetic.

Throughout the narrative, Updike exercises his abiding preoccupations: sex, death and religion, here in the form of faith and belief, not forgetting his wonderful treatment of parents observing their ageing middle-aged children.

There is also a sense of the changing image of America. "Americans aren't safe anywhere," announces Jane, "The world hates us, face it. They're jealous and they hate us and blame us for their own stupidity and corruption and misery."

The two widows set off on a tour of Egypt. There Alexandra discovers that Jane has an irritating habit: "As Jane slept, she sucked the oxygen from the air in the inflexible rhythm of a mechanical pump, monotonous and insatiable, each breath attaining a kind of abrasive wall where it scraped and dipped before turning back in the shape of a hook, tugging Alexandra's brain another notch wider awake. . ."

Meanwhile Sukie, the former local newspaper gossip columnist, now writes romantic fiction. She too has lost her husband and so she decides to contact Alexandra. The trio decide on a trip and arrive in China. "Their baggage was still to emerge on the creaky belts. Other Americans, like frogs whose eyes and nostrils emerge from the muck rimming a shallow pond, began to be visible to them."

There are some good comic touches such as when the trio file by the garishly preserved body of Mao. "As Alexandra stared at the orange profile, Mao's eye opened; its black iris seemingly slid sideways as if to see her, and then shut again, quick as a wink, the eyelid sealed like glued paper." It is Sukie and Jane's little prank. Some time later the three regroup for their return to Eastwick.

It seems all very easy, Updike having fun. Yet this is not a sloppy, hasty novel. Its impact lies in his timing and ability to shift moods; it is funny yet also terrifying, the women, particularly Alexandra, are frightened of death. Updike knows what age is; he is aware of what time does to a body, to skin, as well as to a mind.

Admittedly, the revenge subplot has its moments of bizarre excess and crazy detours. While Alexandra ponders illness, Jane ignores it, and Sukie actively fights it. Updike remains a literary phenomenon, the career writer.

Unlike Bellow and Roth he is not Jewish - a fact which makes his fiction so different. He has his Henry Bech, but Updike is a Wasp. There is a great deal of geography and local history in this book. He has absorbed his east coast region but he has also grasped his country's contrasting textures. It is no coincidence that Alexandra was originally from Colorado, she is the innocent westerner. Her second marriage brings her back west, and in age, she returns there.

Too often criticised for not writing about war, although when he did in the underrated Terrorist (2006) he was attacked for doing so, Updike the novelist and short story writer has spent his career examining the America he knows.

He writes about God, sex and death, because after all, what else is there? Sure, there have been slips along the way, but these are easily forgiven by Roger's Version (1986) and Toward the End of Time (1997), the cohesion of Rabbit, the emotional force of the stories. His wit, humanity and wisdom are comfortably present and accounted for in this offbeat, affecting and characteristically subversive entertainment. And after all, no contemporary prose writer handles language as beautifully as the earthily ethereal Mr Updike

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times