The Widows of Eastwick
By John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 308 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

In 1984, when John Updike’s more than omniscient narrator recounted the strange doings of Jane Smart, Sukie Rougemont and Alexandra Spofford in the small seaside town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, those events were already 12 years old. The sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, is set in the now; all three women are in their 70s. We begin with Alexandra who, having lost the second husband she collected at the Rhode Island School of Design, consoles herself with a 10-day trip in the Canadian Rockies, to which Updike devotes 25 pages, probably because he made the trip himself and didn’t want to waste it. Then Jane loses her second husband and the two widows take a trip up the Nile, which is treated at similar length. Then Sukie loses her second husband, and the three make another trip, this time to China. Seductive as it is to have a stylist as good as Updike as a tour guide, after 100 pages, the reader, like the ladies, is getting nowhere.