JOHN UPDIKE: Love for lists.

AP / MARTHA UPDIKE

It’s difficult now remembering John Updike’s funny, satiric and sexually sumptuous The Witches of Eastwick because the outrageously silly but sleek movie with Jack Nicholson as Darryl Van Horne (the devil), Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer keeps getting in the way. The delicious evils of adultery, the sexual upheavals of the Sixties — Updike’s “primal scene” — the hot tub and the coven’s practical jokes that, alas, unleashed murder and suicide, was a sweet sardonic vision of those sensually extroverted times.

In his new novel, Updike has returned to Alexandra, Jane and Sukie — the motherly, the wittily bitchy, and the up-for-action optimist — all recently widowed: Lexa in Taos, Jane in a huge dark castle in Brookline, and Sukie in Connecticut. They decide to summer in Eastwick, R.I., with intimations of restoring their cone of power to try to heal the wounds and wounded they left behind.

The witchery seems old hat now, almost unnecessary within Updike’s finely wrought prose. Best as ever is his Whitmanic love for lists and images, his sharp suburban eye, his creating the labyrinthine nuances of moods, manners, and social maneuverings. At times the nuances seem more real than the aged crones, but he still relishes the often incandescent presence of everyday objects, the weather, the density of contemporary details and issues, creating a rich panoramic canvas of “Updike-land” so real you can taste and smell it as it gleams and glitters. Surfaces still scintillate, and the brooding mystery of our relationship to them continues to smolder just beneath the surface.

The witches do heal a bit, but death intrudes again. In fact the novel reminds me of Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, with its profound sense of aging and the end of things. Death haunts these bright pages with “the pure everlasting nothingness of it.” Life becomes its own elegy: “Sex, entrapment, weariness, death.” “Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.”

Updike celebrates the thorns of sin that pierce his consciousness in a world where sin is all but ignored. The dark energy of witchcraft battles suburban Christian mores, and there’s a price to pay: “Satan’s mark is upon our pleasures; else we would not be driven to repeat them, even when sated, until they devour us.”

The widows travel to Egypt and China, admiring and fearing the silent pyramids and the Great Wall, manmade structures that confront death in their stone enchantments but cannot beat it: “We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us.”

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a book that aches with gloom and doom. It’s rife with life, the abundances of the world we live in: “Somewhere in all this there has to be a reason for existence, there’s so much of it.” And it bristles with Updike’s luscious prose, life made lyrical however cramped by fear and desire. Against the ancient darkness that cannot be eluded, Updike has yet again created his incandescent, sparkling, luminous world that both cures and kills us.

samcoale@cox.net