Though the toast of the town while alive, John Updike has fallen out of favor since his 2009 death. Perhaps this is because literary styles have changed, and the notoriously prolific writer’s Proustian effusions and adverbial chattiness have no place amid the muscular, subject-verb prose in vogue right now. But Updike’s oeuvre also has the sort of “woman problem” that is less tolerated with every passing year. It’s not that he wasn’t fascinated by women – his work is arguably as awash in female bodily fluids as any male writer’s since James Joyce – but there lurks a hate-love dynamic in it as well. Rooted in his books is the premise that women may be the source of all life but also the source of all trouble – a conflict best exemplified in 1984’s The Witches of Eastwick. Set in a fictional New England town, it focuses on three women whose latent magical powers materialize when a well-heeled stranger rolls into town and beds each of them. Though some hailed the book as a triumph of pagan feminism, others saw it as retrogressive, especially as a man is required to rouse these women into action. Continue Reading →
