Imagine it's 1975 and you're Peter Benchley. You've just published your first novel, a tale about a nasty shark that is an immediate success. Then along comes some guy named Speilberg, and suddenly its his "Jaws" everyone is talking about.
Talk about sharkbite. Ouch!
Making matters worse is that the book is very different from the movie, in many minor and a few major respects. People reading "Jaws" after seeing the movie may scratch their heads seeing the character Richard Dreyfuss played in the movie having a fling with Roy Scheider's wife, or how differently the final confrontation on the "Orca" turns out.
Steven Speilberg definitely improved upon it, but "Jaws" is still a good book, at times very much so. If you can set aside your memory of the movie and try to read this with fresh eyes, you will find yourself enjoying the book, and perhaps even feel, as I do, a little grateful it isn't just a novelization of what was on screen.
Speilberg had the best take on "Jaws" the novel when he said the characters in it are so unlikable he pulled for the shark. I think Benchley wanted exactly that effect. If so, he succeeds. The central character in the novel as in the film, Chief Brody, is lunkheaded if sympathetic. His wife, Ellen, feels shackled not because of the feminist urges then roiling the social scene but because she's a rich girl who married down and now has regrets about the Hampton cocktail soirees she passed up. The citizens of the town, named Amity perhaps ironically, are so cold-blooded they want the beaches kept open, shark or no, because otherwise they lose their summer trade. The mayor is in with the Mob.
As young people stretch out on the beach, Benchley describes the horny fantasies of the boys and their smug upper-middle-class satisfaction. "Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty," Benchley writes, before turning his attention to younger beachgoers with the scorn of a Puritan minister.
"The little children played in the sand at the water's edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become."
Nothing quite like a 20-foot Great White shark to knock the complacency from these sinful folk, maybe send a few to their early just desserts. Benchley sometimes presents this notion of the shark as instrument of divine judgment in a playful way, sometimes more seriously, but it lends an undercurrent to the story unique to the book.
Also unique to the book is Ellen's affair with Hooper the ichthyologist, which moves things quite afield from the shark hunt but has a good deal of suspense in its own right, as Ellen cold-bloodedly sets things in motion and worries more about the possibility of rejection then betraying the father of her three sons. Benchley here captures the social mores of the 1970s with Updikean ruthlessness, and perhaps suggests some of the preternatural reason for the shark's atypical presence off Long Island's southern coast.
Benchley doesn't catch every ball he tosses up, particularly with the mob subplot, and the final confrontation ends things on an abrupt and flat note. But he keeps you uneasily interested throughout, and his descriptions of the shark's attacks are especially well-written. The movie is better for its stronger focus and better humor, among other things, but Benchley's novel deserves credit for giving Speilberg's vision life, and for presenting an alternate fish tale you will enjoy reading, for its own sake as well as for comparison.
