SOURCE: “Wicked Witches of the North,” in New Republic, June 4, 1984, pp. 28–9.

In the following review, Godwin praises Updike's prose and wit in The Witches of Eastwick, but faults the novel for what she perceives as a lack of intellectual depth.

Even in these “postmodern” times, the witch figure continues to excite us. Fully vested by centuries of residence in our psyches, she sallies forth with amazing vigor each time we re-imagine her. Though she assumes a variety of shapes, depending upon the needs and the bugaboos of the culture that summons her, she always brings with her the dread and fascinating certainty of change—and all the outcry and havoc attendant upon any transformation that threatens the status quo.

Witches also provide wonderfully suggestive vehicles for fictional purposes. “Let us respectfully construe the word ‘witch’ as ‘free woman,’” John Updike wrote in his review of a 1978 reissue of...