Inevitably, the trio decide their next joint holiday should be to summer together in Eastwick once more ("Maleficia Revisited"). There, they encounter some of their old loves and victims - and begin tentatively to practise their dark arts again. Updike takes peculiar pleasure in describing these old ladies while they are casting a spell naked - "their eyes helplessly fed on the wrinkles, the warts and scars, the keratoses and liver spots, the slack muscles and patches of crêpey skin crinkled like smooth water touched by a breath of wind, the varicose veins and arthritic deformations with which time had overlaid their old beauty". He's particularly attentive to bad smells, the whiff of an armpit or worse. "Fearful, as she bent over, of releasing a gust of rectal smell, Alexandra moved aside the plastic-handled broom, and entered the opened circle..."

Moreover, Updike takes full advantage of being able to have his female lead characters express nasty home truths about women in general. "Franny was a woman, and knew what women were, dirty and yearning, and in need of being controlled", thinks Alex - or, as it might be, Updike.

Then again, Sukie asks a former lover she has re-encountered: "Was I just a silly piece of ass, an older woman who had no sense and no shame? Did you despise me even as we screwed? Some men do, you know, and still women open themselves to them, we're that desperate."

"How disfigured is... [Updike's] work is by its puerile misogyny!" the critic James Wood once exclaimed. The Widows of Eastwick is the last place to start contesting that verdict. The entwining of sex and mortality that has always been his stock in trade has here become habitual and tired.