Given John Updike’s death in January, it is ironic that the final novel from this tireless explorer of the male psyche should be told from a female perspective. Returning to Alexandra, Jane and Sukie 30 years after The Witches of Eastwick, this sequel finds them reconvening after the deaths of their respective second husbands.

The novel’s opening third concerns itself with trips to Egypt and China. Punctuated with gnomic reflections on grief, ageing and “the fruitful aggravation of having a mate”, the descriptions of these holidays contain so much information about pharaonic burial practices and Emperor Qin that you feel you have blundered out of the novel and into a travel guide.

Things proceed along more traditional, plot-driven lines when, one summer, the widows rent a condo in the erstwhile mansion of Darryl Van Horne, the diabolical object of their desire in the original novel. Their reasons for return are various, but each feels a degree of guilt for the possibly magic-inspired death of Jenny Gabriel, for whom Horne spurned them before running off with her little brother.

As is the case with a significant portion of Updike’s work, The Widows of Eastwick (Penguin; £7.99; Buy this book) contains many wonderful sentences but nevertheless remains an underwhelming novel. Pellucid observations abound — especially concerning the indignity of ageing, against which siege, Updike insists, no fund of wisdom or hard-won equanimity endures — but their elegance is jostled by unnecessary exposition, creaky dialogue and those odd travelogues.

The book’s most engaging aspect is also its most disquieting. While slyly happy to be mistaken for a satire on male chauvinism and the “wickedness” of independent women, it is the opposite. Updike’s women fetishise the male form while being disgusted by their own bodies. Jane and Sukie’s cars are identified by way of their dead male owners (“Nat’s Jaguar”; “Lennie’s BMW”). A rant concludes that men are too domesticated and women aren’t giving birth soon enough. Clumsily, when Alexandra posits a hypothetical person she uses “he” instead of “she”. The only things worse than uppity females are homosexuals, one of whom Sukie — there’s really no other way to describe it — “cures”. On reflection, the lectures about Tutankhamun and the Terracotta Army were preferable.

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