In time Sukie and Alexa go their separate ways, Alexa back to the Navajo knick-knacks out West and Sukie to New York with Chris Gabriel, where they live a life of rather improbable sex and cultural list-ticking. Updike gives us a detailed account of how they achieve sexual satisfaction.
As you would expect of Updike, it’s an interesting book, crammed with acute observation of the changes in the texture of American life and culture. It is also, at times uncomfortably, explicit on sex, both present and remembered, and the descriptions of the trials of the elderly, including odours and emissions, are many. It has always been Updike’s policy to be very direct about these things, just as he is cold-eyed on family foibles and failings, and in his mid-seventies he is obviouly not letting up. Strangely, for so supreme a craftsman, the book is a little unbalanced, too long when it could be brief, and too brief when it could be more detailed. The Witches of Eastwick was a hugely vibrant book, and a departure from his usual realism; this is more autumnal, but no less fascinating as a paean to womanhood.
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