Practical Magic 2 vs The Witches of Eastwick

In mid-September, the sequel to an unloved 1998 film was number one at the American box office, despite competition from two of the year’s most popular releases—The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The story of Practical Magic 2 dates back more than forty years to an unassuming popular fiction written by an under-appreciated novelist that somehow managed to spawn a multi-media franchise. But it is also the story of an earlier, highly acclaimed novel by an overrated writer that has failed to live up to its inflated reputation.

In his 2023 history of postwar American fiction, scholar Dan Sinykin notes that 1980 was a watershed year for the American popular novel. Prior to that, a great deal of popular fiction was only published in paperback. And since no one bothered to publish a list of paperback bestsellers before the 1980s, those books were generally treated with disdain by serious people. Hardback bestseller lists frequently featured prestigious authors in their top spots. The bestselling novel of 1960 was Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent. The list also included Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. In 1961, the bestselling novel was The Agony and the Ecstasy, written by Irving Stone and based on the life of Michelangelo. Just below that was J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning To Kill a Mockingbird was third. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was sixth. Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness was ninth. And John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was tenth. Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools was the bestselling novel of 1962. Mary McCarthy’s The Group was the second bestselling fiction of 1963, followed by J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour.

Gradually, though, populist/commercial novels began to elbow out offerings from the academic crowd. Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Arthur Hailey’s Airport, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and other pop fictions began pushing writers like Mary McCarthy and Henry Miller to the back of the bookstore. As a result, a growing number of pop fictions received hardcover releases. By the end of the 1970s, the transformation was complete. The ten bestselling authors of 1978 were James A. Michener (a Pulitzer winner in 1948, but a pop-fiction machine by the 1970s), Herman Wouk (ditto, if you switch 1948 to 1952), Mario Puzo, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Belva Plain, Richard Bach, Robert Ludlum, Howard Fast, and Ken Follett. All of these authors were more loved by common readers than by literary snobs.

By 1980, corporate America had realised that there was big money to be made from a handful of mega-bestselling authors like Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Dean Koontz. In previous eras, publishing had been considered a trade for gentlemen of taste and discernment. The industry was dominated by men like Alfred A. Knopf, who considered it his mission to bring high-quality literature to American homes and libraries. Nothing thrilled Knopf and his ilk like seeing an author of theirs win a prestigious book prize. Now, book prizes took a backseat to bestseller lists. Some elite cultural critics lamented this development. In their telling, soulless corporations went looking for authors who could sell hundreds of thousands of copies in hardback, and began ignoring the true literary geniuses like William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and others who were more interested in style than in sales.

“What happened in 1980?” Dan Sinykin asks. “The logic of publishing split in two, into popularity and prestige, if not without aspirations to find those unicorns that could achieve both.” Smaller publishing houses—often nonprofits affiliated with universities, or independent presses financed by wealthy patrons—continued to seek out prestigious works of fiction. But big multinational conglomerates were buying up major publishing companies in America and ditching writers who weren’t capable of hitting the bestsellers list. Quoting Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sinykin writes, “between 1986 and 1996, ‘63 of the 100 bestselling books in the United States were written by just six authors: Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel.’” The success of writers like King and Clancy put pressure on many so-called “serious literary writers” to make their works more popular. Which may be why writers like John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) and Toni Morrison wrote ghost stories (Mickelsson’s Ghosts and Beloved, respectively), writers like Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy wrote Westerns (Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian, respectively), and writers like Norman Mailer and E.L. Doctorow wrote crime thrillers (Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Billy Bathgate, respectively). Then, in 1984, John Updike published The Witches of Eastwick.

Back in 1968, Updike had managed to write the second bestselling book of the year, Couples (published by Knopf), which was outsold only by Arthur Hailey’s mega-bestseller, Airport. The success of Couples was almost entirely due to its frank depiction of suburban sexual mores. Ordinary readers looking for titillation bought the book in droves, but were likely disappointed to discover that Updike’s sex writing was pretty much like all his writing: dull and self-consciously mannered. S.J. Perelman, one of Updike’s New Yorker colleagues, once wrote that reading Updike’s prose caused him to be “overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page.”

Though he would go on winning plaudits and prizes until his dying day, Updike never again rose that high on a year-end list of bestsellers. And by 1984, he seemed to be longing for another taste of that popular success. So, like a lot of other prestigious writers in the 1980s, he looked at the likes of Stephen King and Anne Rice and decided, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He then wrote one of the more boring novels about witches ever published. Naturally, the literati loved it. Margaret Atwood raved about it in the New York Times, and most of the other book critics fell into line. In 1987, a movie adaptation by Mad Max director George Miller starring Susan Sarandon, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson became the tenth biggest box-office success in America that year. (The film’s plot differed greatly from that of the book, presumably because the filmmakers decided that book just isn’t that interesting.)

Eleven years after The Witches of Eastwick was published, Alice Hoffman published her eleventh novel, Practical Magic, a story of two weird sisters. It sold well and received many positive reviews, but it didn’t create anything like the buzz that Updike’s novel had received. In 1998, it was made into a film by Griffin Dunne starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Critics hated it, and although it earned US$68.3 million worldwide, its US$75 million production costs made it a financial wash. Hoffman’s tale seemed to be destined to be forgotten long before Updike’s ever would be, but over the years, the fates of the two franchises have reversed.

In the early 2010s, when streaming services allowed viewers to watch Dunne’s film whenever they wanted, it developed a reputation, particularly among women, as the perfect comfort watch, with its great real-estate porn, cosy interiors, comfy New England setting, catchy soundtrack, and top-notch cast (which included Aidan Quinn, Dianne Wiest, Stockard Channing, Chloe Webb, and Evan Rachel Wood). Gradually, Practical Magic evolved from forgotten piece of 1990s schlock to cult classic. Although the film still has a dismal 31 percent approval rating among professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes, ordinary film-lovers have boosted its popular rating to 73 percent (The Witches of Eastwick has a 67 percent rating among film critics and a 62 percent rating among ordinary viewers).

Hoffman knew an opportunity when she saw one. In 2017, she published The Rules of Magic, a prequel to Practical Magic, and it became a big hit with her readership. She followed it in 2020 with another prequel, Magic Lessons. And then, in 2021, she brought out a sequel to Practical Magic called The Book of Magic, which has just become Practical Magic 2. The novel series seems to be improving with the passing years. Practical Magic has a 3.70 (out of 5) star rating on Goodreads as of this writing. The Rules of Magic is rated 4.02. The Book of Magic is rated 4.13. And Magic Lessons is rated 4.22. Meanwhile, The Witches of Eastwick has an anaemic 3.21 rating. Updike’s novel has generated 1,813 reader reviews; Practical Magic has generated 17,892.

Nowadays, almost no one still rates The Witches of Eastwick highly. In 1984, Updike claimed he wrote it in an effort to pacify the feminist critics who had objected to the treatment of women in his previous fictions. Updike was part of a group of Important Writers (along with the likes of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Heller) who were frequently criticised for the sexism in their books. But it’s hard to see how Updike believed that a novel about three smart women who all fall under the spell of an obnoxious demon might redeem him. The few readers who still comment about the book online today often note the author’s apparent sexism as its leading feature. Here’s Ellen, a Goodreads reviewer: