Jaws
Peter Benchley | Bantam | 1974 | 309 pages

Too young to dream that my parents would ever take me to the screening of Jaws when it opened in theaters in the summer of 1975, I nevertheless managed to persuade my mother to buy me the Peter Benchley novel. Presented in a wire-mesh basket at the supermarket (possibly a Piggly Wiggly) check-out next to the impulse tabloids that shoppers browse while waiting in line, the Bantam paperback drove itself into my consciousness like the apex predator surging upward on the book’s cover. Since I couldn’t see the movie, I simply refused to be denied the book, which I consumed greedily (and somewhat haltingly, since it was clearly above my recommended reading level, if for content and subject matter rather than vocabulary) in a few sittings over the weekend.

How does the book hold up upon rereading after forty-plus years?

First, an obvious but critical disclaimer: This is not Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. However you feel about the director, his lack of subtlety or ham-fisted sentimentality, Spielberg’s consummate skill as a filmmaker and mastery of the techniques of the medium are fully on display in the film, even though he was only in his mid-twenties at the time of production. Jaws, the movie, not only established the foundation (for better, or for worse) for the summer blockbuster, but detonated a full-blown pop-cultural phenomenon.

Benchley’s novel lacks the bullet-proof construction and expert pacing of the film, allowing ample time to wallow in the melodrama of resort town life, with its perpetual tug-of-war between the tourists and the townies. The strained marriage between Chief Martin Brody, an Amity local, and his bored wife, Ellen, a former summers-only tourist who now longs for her lost lifestyle, occupies the emotional core of the novel. Even Matt Hooper, the ichthyologist from Wood’s hole, serves more as a catalyst for rekindling Ellen’s past life than as an agent for the study and capture of the shark plaguing the waters off Amity. 

Not that the book lacks suspense. The early chapters involving the fateful skinny dipper, Christine Watkins, and a doomed young boy on an inflatable raft deliver thrilling, visceral sequences. Lean, economical prose details the movements of the shark, signalling the fateful outcome of the encounters long before the victim becomes aware of the threat. Another attack, in shallow water barely at wading depth, is described via a third-person account, but still resonates with a primal horror, as the victim is repeatedly hit while onlookers attempt to pull him from the surf.

In contrast to the contemporary environment of “Mega”, “Super”, or “Ultra” prefix marketing hyperbole, it’s interesting to note that the monster shark terrorizing the swimmers of Amity is referred to simply as “the fish”.

The middle chapters tend to drag, including a long dinner party that underscores the tension between the Brody, his wife, and Hooper, but at the expense of further stalling the narrative. The overall pacing suffers another blow with the subsequent chapter, detailing Ellen Brody’s affair with Hooper. Awkward at best, their illicit encounter degenerates into wince-inducing territory as Ellen reveals some regressively outdated and offensive (by today’s standards) erotic fantasies to Hooper during their seductive tête-à-tête. The specifics surrounding the application of spray-on deodorant and the logistics of Ellen’s panties are probably not the best subjects for rumination while waiting for the great fish to resurface.

The story is completely transformed in part three, however, after Brody hires Quint, a laconic local fisherman, to catch and kill the shark. Although the melodrama from the mainland continues in the onboard tension between Brody and Hooper, the focus intensifies as the intrepid shark-hunters set out in Quint’s boat, the Orca, setting the stage for an epic struggle for the bragging rights atop the food chain. Quint is a compelling character, although his seemingly sudden obsession with the shark becomes a shorthand substitute for Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, a reduction that culminates in a haunting, even if overly familiar, image of his final demise.

Incidentally, I would return to that supermarket a few years later, age 11, and beg for the purchase of yet another impulse checkout display: Alan Dean Foster’s movie tie-in novelization of Star Wars. That one I took home and immediately read cover to cover, twice.