I walked into Madeleine Morrel's office yesterday with a copy of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, sticking out of my bag.
"Did you know he died today?" she asked. "I just got the CNN blast."
I have been reading John Updike since I was in junior high school. (I was a precocious child, born into a family of readers, and reading adult novels before I was ten.) He is one of America's great novelists; and his work will live on. If you haven't read him, start now with The Witches of Eastwick and then read its sequel, Widows.
Updike loved women. He understood them better than most men, including male writers, do. Witches was considered by some critics to be his statement on the wages of feminism: The women's movement unleashed this primal sexual power in women and encouraged them to use it in evil ways.
Nonsense!
Updike discovered women's sexual power when he began writing in the 1950s. He didn't fear it or seek to repress it. In this last novel, the sexy young witches are old now, but he still gives them the grace of their sexual feelings and desires, perhaps more rooted in memory than present reality, that stir in their brains and pussies.
John Updike was a man who loved women.
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