The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike, Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £18.99
"On the face of it, a sequel to John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick is a promising idea," said Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times. His 1984 fantasia about three suburban witches turning their neat town upside down was one of his most successful and enjoyable novels. The new book finds its heroines, after the deaths of their second husbands, deciding to summer in Eastwick. And it is, unfortunately, a "singularly unsuccessful effort". Given the "feebleness" of the magic they conjure up, the witches "might as well be estate agents". It is as if "everyone wishes they were back in the prequel, where all the fun is".

"Updike has had a long and distinguished career," said Christopher Tayler in the Guardian: many would say that his Rabbit novels put him in the company of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. But The Widows of Eastwick makes him look like "an almost spookily unreflective prettifier of baby-boom Americana, with a blind eye to various uglinesses and a sideline in overwritten vagina descriptions". Yet, even in this duff novel, the old master does manage the odd "awe-inspiring" sentence.

LAST UPDATED 2:21 PM, NOVEMBER 13, 2008