Review of witch novel prompts another Updike comparison

In Wyatt Mason‘s June 4 Wall Street Journal review of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, the reviewer praised author Rivka Galchen by comparing her novel to what he feels are less successful witch-driven narratives:

“High-art witch stories have tended to fare less well, the metaphorical potential of the material turning art into a civics class. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible is the worst of these, so clearly an allegory for Wrongful Persecution by the Powerful. It is almost tied for badness with John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a satire of male power (creep undone by vengeful coven) that these days is hard not to read as a male fantasy about a four-way with a man in the middle.”

If you’re going to be criticized, there’s worse company to be in than Arthur Miller’s.

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