The editors of The American Scholar decided to out “famous and infamous writers” for “first sentences of a novel, either overwrought or just plain embarrassing, that elicit a groan or a smack of the forehead,” and included among them is John Updike’s opening to The Widows of Eastwick:

“Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our pleasant town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable.”

Also making the list is a novelist with whom Updike “competed” all of his writing life. Philip Roth was upbraided for his opening line to The Breast: “It began oddly.”

The editors’ “highly subjective list” is titled “Ten Worst Opening Lines.”