The women find they are compatible enough to want to spend a summer together in their old haunt of Eastwick. Updike is a meticulous observer, but these pages are still too close to travelogue for comfort. Finally Sukie joins the other two on a package tour to China. First Alexandra goes on a train trip of the Canadian Rockies by herself, then she joins Jane to explore the Nile. The first part of the book, in which the women re-establish their connection, is by some way the weakest. But despite his otherworldly origins she misses the life she shared with a real man. Alexandra, for instance, cooked up her lovely husband Jim, a lean taciturn potter with a limp, from a hollowed pumpkin, a cowboy hat and 'a pinch of Western soil scraped from inside the back fender of a pick-up truck with Colorado plates'.

In The Widows of Eastwick the three retired witches, widely separated in space, have lost husbands who were real men with their own histories, virtues and limitations, and at the same time had been magically conjured by their wives. The key is to avoid the pace of a thriller, never a problem with a prose as quietly rich as John Updike's, and a strategy adopted with success by Hilary Mantel in her splendid Beyond Black. Or it can be, if writers care to exploit the possibility. It holds on firmly to dual nationality, unlike the film version of the earlier book, which crossed over fairly crassly - but genre in books is much more flexible than in films. T he widows of Eastwick contains witches and spells, but like its 1984 predecessor, The Witches of Eastwick, resists crossing over into the category of the paranormal.

The witches of eastwick by john updike