I thought I would do something different with this book and sort of detail my day to day reading impressions. John Updike’s ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ was first published in 1984. The movie version came out in 1987 and starred Jack Nicolson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon. It was roughly around that time that I read the book, but I read it after seeing the film. I have seen the film in recent years and have forgotten much about the book except that my impression of it was misogynist. The exact reasons I felt this way I have forgotten.
John Updike died in January of this year and ‘The Widows of Eastwick’ his last released novel, October 2008, although he had/has a collection of short stories set for release in 2009.
Wednesday, August 5
I’m struck on how such brilliant writing can be sooooooo boring. I’m sixty pages in and all I have to show for the effort is that Alexander (played by Cher in the movie) went to the Canadian Rockies after her husband of thirty years dies. She hooks back up with Jane (who was Susan Sarandon in the film) whose husband has also died and they decide to go to Egypt together. There was some debate about the threat of terrorism and I sort of wish at this point that some terrorist organization would capture the women and put me out of my agony and make this revisiting of the witches a short story.
To be more precise, I think Updike has a great writing style, he is very detailed oriented. He is writing thus far from the perspective of Alexander and he mimics a woman’s mind to a great degree, although I still feel it is an imitation. The reality is that he was a male writer trying to write about the mindset of a female and I can’t help but wonder if in many ways he thought this is the way women think or is they how he wishes they would think. I mentioned before that my impression of the first novel, of this two novel ‘Eastwick’ series, came off as misogynist to me, I have since read criticism that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. With a twenty-five year lap between the novels, I contemplate if Updike took the misogynist observations to heart and tried to remedy the perceived errors of his ways thus attempted to make the characters seem less male identified, or was he such a blowfish that he didn’t care what others saw in the characters because they were his characters? If anything, a twenty-five year span, which is more like thirty something year difference in the book, could have changed the outlooks of the characters due to changes regarding their age and overall cultural transformation? Is all this inner debate unproductive because a man of Updike’s generation very likely would never understand the inner workings of a female mind or is it I who presides in the X Generation who doesn’t understand the inner workings of women of generations older than myself?
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