Today I bring you a delicious excerpt from last Sunday's NY Times. Tis a book review by Sam Tanenhaus regarding John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick. One part really jumped out of the page. The novel is set in Nixon-era Rhode Island, but the description sounds a bit more like modern-day New York....
A triad of literal witches, sexually rapacious divorcees in their 30s, prey on the menfolk in a shabby-trendy Rhode Island seaside town and, as their power grows, also terrorize the local citizens...
And yet, despite their dream of female empowerment, the witches' fantasies center on a man, a mysteriously well-heeled newcomer 'with greasy curly hair half-hiding behind his ears and clumped at the back...Unsubtly named Darryl Van Horne, he is either Satan or his emissary, given to voluble though not quite coherent Mephistophelian theorizing. Aware the three divorcees are devil-worshipers, he lures them into the brick mansion, Eastwick's finest, which he has bought and gaudily refurbished. The 'malefactresses' cavort in Van Horne's 'eight-foot hot tub,' sexually servicing him and at times one another. They also greedily imbibe lethal cocktails, 'alchemically concocted of tequila and grenadine and creme de cassis and Triple Sec,'...
Sounds like wicked good fun to me. I wonder what Mephistophelian means. If Updike's book comes anywhere close to the quality of this review, I'm totally running out and buying a copy.
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