No, I didn’t want to read another review of John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick, either—until I saw that the London Review of Books‘ critique is by James Wolcott, who’s perennially on fire like one of those burning coal mines (and, thank God, is “working on a memoir about 1970s Manhattan”). Wolcott has a winning way of accentuating the positive by taking for granted the negative, dispensing justice that is elegant in its balance of cheery severity and generosity.—Jonathan Taylor