They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming Book

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. 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. Some might even say he's the devil. 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.

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. 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. They're each repulsed by Van Horne, the swarthy, super rich New Yorker, but all attracted to him as well.

Let me start with what this novel is not. 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. Their development hinges on their relationship to various men. 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). 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. And finally, this novel is not readable.

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. It was, she dimly perceived, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. Her recipe called for no onions, two cloves of garlic minced and sauteed 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. All this must be added to her own tomatoes, picked and stored on every window sill these weeks past and now sliced and fed to teh 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. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic is such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so notoriously tolerant of corpulence.

There are longer paragraphs in The Witches of Eastwick and shorter paragraphs, but this is representative of Updike's focus, which isn't on character or storytelling but on his own brilliance at turning a word. It's writing that is quite pleased with itself and satisfied with how well it has women figured out. Despite the publishing date, this feels like a relic of the Swinging Sixties. A film adaptation released in 1987 took place in the present day and starred Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer. Nicholson's charms and special effects are the focus, while the relegation of the female characters to fashion accessories are a holdover from the obtuse book.