Like so much else in this sequel to the 1984 "Witches," the snoring is a stick of excellently turned furniture in a house where not much stirs - certainly not the mad, rather awful, yet comically gripping extravagances of the earlier book.
See, though, what John Updike does with this particular stick. Here, as in a few of his other books, he is a formidable master of writing, even when what he writes about sags. Jane's snore is a trumpet call to the warhorse. He gathers his legs, begins his charge:
"Awake or asleep, Jane insisted, with a relentless, unforgiving will, on being heard," Alexandra reflects. The charge builds up speed and shakes the ground: "As Jane slept, she sucked the oxygen from the air in the inflexible rhythm of a mechanical pump, monotonous and insatiable, each breath attaining a kind of abrasive wall where it scraped and dipped before turning back in the shape of a hook, tugging Alexandra's brain another notch wider awake."
No more than a snore to end all literary snores? Yes, more. It fixes the characters and relationships of the formidably single-purposed aging woman and her many-purposed, introspective former partner in witching. Not entirely former, though.
As Alexandra and Jane continue their travels, soon joined by Sukie (all three widowed and separated since their scandalous doings 30 years earlier forced them out of Eastwick), Jane does a couple of tiny spells for practice. In Egypt she brings down a bat flying overhead; in China she gets the mummified corpse of Mao to wink. When they decide to revisit Eastwick, where their lives had turned briefly electric - suburbanly banal before, comfortably banal since - things become more serious.
They have been neither forgotten nor forgiven. The townspeople are cold or snide. A married lover seduced by Sukie for his beautiful body (she was a local reporter for whom "sleeping around was a kind of news-gathering") presses her with threatening attentions. The widow of the plumber who had been Alexandra's lover grimly indicates that she must use her witchery to get the widow's barren daughter to conceive.
Somehow, perhaps not coincidentally, these things get solved. And then the widow of Jane's musician lover, after a freezing greeting, summons a revenger.
