I recently re-read JAWS, by Peter Benchley. I haven't read it in probably thirty-five years. I remember that when I was a teenager, the book fascinated me.
As an adult, I found it . . . less fascinating.
(Even though the book came out 47 years ago, I'll post a SPOILER WARNING.)
The book hasn't aged well, though I also found quite a lot of stuff in the book that really should have disqualified it from best-seller status even in 1974, when it first came out. I came to the conclusion that the book succeeded purely on the merits of its idea, and the actual writing had little or nothing to do with it.
Why? Well...
The book is supposed to be a thriller, but the pacing is way, way off. It starts with a bang--the famous scene when the shark devours Christy Watkins. After that, though, the suspense dies off miserably. Nothing happens for chapter after chapter. The main story is the bickering between our hero Brody and the town council about whether or not Brody should close the beaches. It's slow and dull, and could have been cut to a single chapter. Later, the shark attacks young Alex Kintner, and the book picks up again--and then we slide back into petty town bickering.
When Brody, Quint (the shark catcher), and Matt Hooper (the biologist) finally--FINALLY--get out on the ocean to hunt the shark, Benchley repeatedly builds suspense, then kills it. The trio encounters the shark, fight it for a while, then goes back home. This happens THREE TIMES. The final confrontation between Quint, Brody, and the shark ends up being rushed--and anti-climactic. Quint has stabbed and shot the shark several times, and it's dying by the time it sinks the boat, you see. Brody is in the water, The shark is coming toward Brody, jaw open, and it . . . dies. It sinks on its own and disappears. Anti-climactic. Not only that, THE PROTAGONIST DOESN'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Brody does nothing on the shark hunt but ladle chum and watch Quint and Hooper fight the shark. He's a bystander in his own story.
And then we have the characters. Boy, oh boy, oh boy.
Brody is, frankly, boring. He's a sheriff with a wife and . . . that's really it. He has no hobbies, doesn't read, doesn't spend time with his kids, does nothing around the house, and treats his wife Ellen almost like property. He's flat and bland, and I really didn't care if he lived or died.
Matt Hooper is similarly dull. He's the stereotypical good-looking, rich guy. He has a one-time assignation with Ellen, and when they start talking about their sexual fantasies (as a way of flirting), his dialogue becomes cringe-worthy and painful. So does Ellen's, for that matter. Benchley doesn't go at all into Hooper's reactions over the affair. Hooper does only two things in the book--he tries to study the shark, and he has an affair with Ellen Brody. That's basically it. I couldn't even get a good visual image of him, and I realized it's because Benchley doesn't describe him, except to say he's handsome and has blue eyes. Meanwhile, Ellen is described several times in lush detail, and Benchley uses the embarrassingly-bad trope of having her stand naked in front of a mirror so he can have an excuse to have her think about everything from her hips to her hair to her nipples. None of the male characters get similar treatment, I must add.
Side note: the subplot with Ellen's affair falls utterly flat. Ellen is bored. Brody is uncaring. We see no real stakes about their marriage because neither one of them seems to care much about it. Brody only becomes concerned about Ellen when he suspects she's cheating. He never thinks about how much he loves her, and he only actually says it to her once, while she's sleeping. Although Brody does a lot of self-reflection about his motives for hunting the shark, he never once reflects about his own marriage, how the problem might be that he has failed to maintain his relationship with his wife, how he treats her like a housekeeper and nanny rather than a wife and partner. No, he gets pissed off at Hooper and launches a half-assed investigation to figure out if Hooper and Ellen were together on a particular afternoon. To top it off, this subplot is never resolved.
Quint, the shark hunter, gets short shrift as well. We know NOTHING about him, not even whether Quint is his first or his last name. We don't know why he wants to hunt sharks, why he's so callous about fish and fishing, or why he's so focused on money. (Money is, in fact, the only thing that motivates him in the book.) The movie makes him the survivor of a terrible navy accident in which his crew mates are devoured by sharks, sending him down the path of shark hunter, but that's nowhere to be seen in the book.
Speaking of Ellen--here we have another flat character. She only exists in the book as Brody's Wife. She has almost no life outside this. She seems to volunteer at the hospital, but we only see it once, and then only when she ditches work so she can have her fling with Hooper. She fixes drinks and cooks supper and argues with Brody and picks the kids up from activities. She's bored a lot (someone needs to tell Pete that bored characters are themselves boring), and she's unhappy with her marriage. In other words, she's the stereotype of a 70s housewife.
Actually, ALL the women are especially flat. Pete clearly hasn't MET any women--or he never paid attention to them. All, and I do mean ALL, the female characters exist solely in the context of their relationships with men. The entire conflict surrounding Ellen is about her unhappy marriage and her affair with Hooper. The shark eats Christy Watkins because she goes down to the beach to have sex with her boyfriend. Two of the town councilors have wives who make brief appearances, and one is described as a wholesome woman who sits at home doing needlepoint in front of the television. The other is described as so shy that she can't barely bring herself to make a phone call, and when her husband tells her he intends to uproot them and move away, she murmurs, "Whatever you think is best, dear." The mayor's secretary talks to Brody, and when he fails to ask her about her dating life, she prompts him to do so. Daisy Wicker, an acquaintance whom Ellen invites to a dinner party, has no personality. Benchley has multiple characters jokingly point this fact out. Ellen tries half-heartedly to fix her up with Hooper, but she turns out to be a lesbian, so he can't date her. Every female character in this book is there to have a relationship with a man.
I don't know why Benchley bothers to make Brody and Ellen parents, either. Unlike the movie, the book barely mentions the Brody sons, and the kids mysteriously vanish during important scenes. Before the dinner party scene, for example, Benchley literally has the boys sitting on their beds in their room waiting to be summoned for supper--and at the party, they're never referred to even once. They are never put into danger (unlike the movie). They have no character development, or even character. The lack is jarring, and it would have been better if Benchley had made the Brodys childless.
Every character in this book is also corrupt in some way. Ellen cheats on her husband. Brody gives up his principles and gives in to the council. The mayor is in the with mob. The newspaper editor is a glutton. The teenaged boys at the beach grind their pelvises into the sand while they watch girls who sometimes deliberately expose themselves to said boys. Christy Watkins has drunken sex on the beach with a guy she's only known for a day (and sexually active women always need to be punished, while their male partners do not). Alex Kintner manipulates his mother. Alex's mother lets him go into the water because she wants some quiet time (and how dare she). Quint is only interested in hunting the shark for money. Hooper wants to study the shark for personal benefit, not to help the town, and he sleeps with Ellen. A family of fat tourists complain to Brody that they drove two hours to Amity and they haven't seen the shark eat anyone. I know it's a trope that characters in a horror or suspense novel are supposed to be deserving of their fate, but since we don't care about these people, we also don't care when the shark eats one of them.
The book ends where the movie does--with Brody kicking his way toward shore. There's no reunion with his wife and sons, no final resolution with Ellen about their marriage, nothing. And why should there be? Those things are clearly unimportant.
The movie is superior to the novel in every way. Better character development, better plotting, better suspense. The books is yet another example of a crappy book somehow making its way onto the best-seller lists.
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