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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Heart of the Story Is Still Fresh,
By
This review is from: Jaws (Mass Market Paperback)
When Peter Benchley first met with the editor of Doubleday, he was more interested in getting a book deal for some of his non-fictional pieces. However, the only thing the editor was interested in at that time was Benchley's idea for a novel about a man-eating shark. Benchley had been mulling over the idea for quite awhile. A few years later, the result of that meeting became the novel JAWS, a book that was so popular the rights to the film were sold even before the book was published. The book remained on best-seller lists for 44 weeks and the film-adaptation, directed by a young Steven Spielberg, became the first blockbuster movie, grossing over $100 million at the box office. Currently, the novel remains largely forgotten, overshadowed by the movie. In fact, most people have no idea that the movie is based upon a novel.
Like the film adaptation, JAWS largely revolves around police chief Martin Brody. Brody is a good cop, doing his best to keep law and order, while at the same time making his hometown look as best as possible for the summer people whose tourism keeps the small seaside resort city of Amity, New York alive the rest of the year. A few weeks before the summer season begins, a young woman's body is found half-eaten on a beach. It's no mistake that the girl was eaten by a shark and though the incident was probably a one-time occurrence, Brody wants to close the beaches for a few days as a safety precaution. The elected officials of the city are completely against the idea, especially mayor Larry Vaughan. Believing the attack to be a fluke, the editor of the local newspaper and good friend of Chief Brody, Harry Meadows keeps the story quiet. A few days later a young boy and an older man are killed while swimming, proving that Brody's precaution should have been taken. After a local fisherman is killed while hunting for the shark, Meadows brings in an oceanographer, Matt Hooper, to help Brody in figuring out how to deal with the shark. The story slowly simmers until Brody and Hooper join an infamous fisherman named Quint on an expedition to hunt down and kill the beast. It's easy to see why JAWS was such a blockbuster when it was first published. The scenes describing the shark attacks and the eventual showdown to hunt the creature down are impressive page turners. The characters in the story are deeply flawed individuals who come off largely as unlikable. Before taking over the helm of the motion picture adaptation of JAWS, Steven Spielberg once commented that when he first read the novel he wanted the shark to win in the end. As the story's hero, Martin Brody is the most sympathetic and likeable of all the characters. He's a man who wants to do the right thing, both as Sheriff and as a husband and father. He's a man from a different era, trying his best to adjust to a dramatically changing social and cultural landscape. He likes to drink occasionally, but that's his only vice. Brody's wife Ellen isn't nearly as sympathetic. She and Matt Hooper have an entire subplot in the story that leads to the two of them having an affair. Her actions aren't a result of any inattention from Brody, but are brought about because of her own insecurities of the life of wealth and luxury she gave up when she married Brody. Hooper, on the other hand, is even less likeable. The product of divorced, but wealthy parents, Hooper is quiet stuck on himself. He thinks he knows everything and never takes a moment to consider others. As for Quint, he's pretty much the rough and ragged fisherman that Robert Shaw portrayed him as in the movie; he's a modern day Capt. Ahab seeking a great white shark instead of a great white whale. The town's publisher, Harry Meadows, is a glutton who enjoys holding back information from the big-league newspapers so that he can get the scoop. As for mayor Larry Vaughan, it turns out he took out an emergency loan from the mafia years ago and now they have him involved in a real estate deal which taints his judgment as an elected official. The subplot about Ellen's affair with Hooper doesn't have anything to do with the actual plot of JAWS. Instead, it seems to be a distraction that's more a reflection of the attitudes and mores of the 1970s that was especially true in the "literature" of the time. Over thirty-five years after its initial publication, JAWS is still a good story. The main plot of the story, Brody and his companions defense against and eventual hunt for a great white shark, is a great tale. It's a streamlined version of MOBY DICK, but with a more likeable protagonist. The affair subplot could have been axed from the novel and it wouldn't have made much difference (it's completely non-existent in the movie). The ending is also a little flat and is a bit of a let down after such a drawn-out build-up. We know much more about sharks than we did when JAWS was first published and so the threat of a shark attack isn't as frightening as it was in the mid-1970s. However, that modern knowledge doesn't make JAWS any less of a page-turner than when it was first published.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jaws visits the second generation,
By Judith "Judith" (northern California) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Jaws (Mass Market Paperback)
Of course I read Jaws when it first came out when I was a teenager. I can still remember lying out on our back porch one brutally hot summer and chewing through the pages, no pun intended. Well, my ten year-old recently insisted he was ready to read the book that inspired his favorite movie, so I ordered it for him from Amazon. He got through the first sex scene and threw the book down, completely grossed out. (Ha! He'll read it differently in a few years.) After he put it down, I picked it up again and it was almost as good as I remembered thirty five years ago. What fun.
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