John Updike is still cleaning up the tomatoes hurled at his last outing, Terrorist, so he must feel pretty good about a rave for his latest novel, The Widows of Eastwick, in the Times Book Review. "The genius inheres in the precise observation," Sam Tanenhaus writes, "in the equally precise language, but above all in the illusion that the image has been received and processed in real time, when in truth Updike has slowed events to a dreamlike pace and given them a dream's hyperreality, so that the distinction between the actual and the imagine feels erased." Tanenhaus continues: "This isn't writing. It is magic."
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