Matt's Reviews > Jaws

“At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand. She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg, and then she was overcome by a rush of nausea and dizziness. Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood…”
- Peter Benchley, Jaws

I have been told many, many times that I write long reviews. That’s my style, and I’m sticking with it. But I’m willing to experiment. Accordingly, I decided to try a little writing exercise. Instead of explaining myself, I’m going the Twitter route. No explanations! Only conclusions!

So, without further ado, here is my four word review of Jaws: Just watch the movie.

Helpful? Not really? Okay. Let’s try this. I will do a two sentence review (though it will also have only four words): Less talk. More chomp.

***

Still here? All right, I have a few things to add.

First, I have to say upfront that discussing Peter Benchley’s novel is impossible without reference to Steven Spielberg’s film. This is one of the rare instances where the old chestnut about the “book being better than the movie” is completely wrong. It’s not simply a matter of the book being terrible and the movie being great. It’s a matter of the movie being one of the greatest of all time, and making the book seem terrible by comparison. Thus, I constantly had to remind myself to judge Benchley’s work as literature, rather than engage in a one-sided comparative analysis.

Second, with that said, I will still probably refer to Spielberg’s all-time classic more than a couple times.

***

Jaws is a novel I’ve read twice before. The first time I was way, way too young to fully grasp what I was reading. I am referring, of course, to some of the most horribly written sex scenes this side of early Ken Follett. The second time I read it, I was a bit savvier, able to comprehend (if not enjoy) what I was reading, and definitely appreciated the awful sex scenes (probably too much, if we’re being honest).

This, my third read-through, came about after watching the film for the (roughly) millionth time in my life. Afterwards, I pulled my battered paperback off the shelf and decided to test my earlier recollections. At 278 pages, it is a small time investment, and it’s summery setting allowed me to pretend that warmer weather was coming, even as alternating snow/rain showers dampened my hopes.

***

The most striking thing about Jaws is how its premise is absolutely perfect. Quaint ocean-side village, dependent on summer tourism dollars, is terrorized by a killer Great White Shark. A cop, a marine biologist, and an obsessed fisherman go out to stop it. A solid gold story.

Early on, Benchley capitalizes on this, to wonderful effect. His novel starts with an irresistible (fish) hook: “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.” Within the first few pages there is a graphic and terrifying attack. Benchley immediately had me on the line, and all he had to do was reel me in.

(You are probably wondering, at this point, whether I will stop using the cheap fishing metaphors. The answer is yes. Not because you’re asking, but because I ran out).

And then Benchley utterly screws things up. Instead of honing in on what works, instead of tightly focusing on the central conflict of man versus nature, Benchley drifts away with the tide. This should have been Moby Dick, but with a Shark. Instead, it’s Moby Dick, but with a Shark, and a shading of The Godfather, and a bit of half-baked Updike.

Among the film's many achievements is its near-flawless pacing. The shark attacks. The denizens of Amity aren’t sure it’s a shark, so they keep swimming. The shark attacks again. The town responds by killing a different shark. The shark returns a third time, reminding everyone of the danger. And so on and so forth. All the film’s conflicts are drawn from the (mostly) unseen menace beneath the waves. The tension continues to rise as this shark, circling the island, draws tight an invisible noose, until our heroes must leave land and confront the beast on its own turf.

Benchley has no use for this pared-down – albeit highly effectual – narrative arc. Instead, after the initial onslaught, the storyline sort of wanders away. Chief Brody, Amity’s top cop, starts to lose the thread of his case. Instead of worrying incessantly about the shark, he becomes preoccupied by Mayor Larry Vaughn, and Vaughn’s secretive business dealings. Meanwhile, Brody’s wife, Ellen, is having a hell of a life crisis. Born wealthy, she went slumming to marry Brody, and now, three kids later, she is starting to regret her decision. When young Woods Hole oceanographer Matt Hooper – a trust funder himself – comes to town, Ellen’s eyes start to wander.

(This is not really a spoiler, but more of an irrelevant aside: (view spoiler)[The hardest thing about reconciling book with film is the fact that Richard Dreyfuss played Hooper in the movie. Book Hooper and Movie Hooper are light years apart. Yet I couldn’t create a Book Hooper in my mind, so I just used Dreyfuss. The results are – and I’m not exaggerating – quite horrifying. If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read the book, I dare you to – while imagining Richard Dreyfuss (hide spoiler)])

***

One of Benchley’s big themes, if it can be called that, is the notion of class immutability. I’m not talking simply wealth, though it plays a role. Rather, I’m referring to how certain groups of people hold themselves out as a distinct caste, superior to others, who are not allowed access to this inner circle. At one point, Benchley writes about a bunch of rich youngsters sunning themselves on the beach:

These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, of justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth – thanks either to breeding or orthodontia – were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.

This is an excellent passage. A pointed and humorous critique of upper middle class privilege in the 1970s. But it felt like it belonged in a different book. Benchley uses this observation as a jumping-off point for an extended live-autopsy of Brody and Ellen’s marriage. The centerpiece of this narrative deviation is a dinner party that Ellen throws on Hooper’s behalf. During the liquor-fueled evening, Benchley delves into the psyches of both husband and wife. To his credit (I suppose), he is not afraid to make them both terrible people. Brody is brutish, coarse, a bit of a lout, and a functioning alcoholic to boot. Ellen is a 36 year-old mother reverting to a spoiled 15 year-old teenager with a Barneys charge card. Again, in an entirely different novel, this totally works as a scene from a marriage about to implode. But this is Jaws! A dinner party is your main set piece?

***

Above, I mentioned the awkward sex scenes. I don’t want to spoil them for you. They are a treat. Specifically, there is a lunchtime conversation about sexual fantasies that is among the most cringe-inducing things I’ve ever read. I sort of wished I’d filmed myself reading it. My face would have looked like I’d just shoved an entire lemon into my mouth, and bit down.

***

Things eventually come back around to the shark. By that point, though, I hardly cared.

The movie’s version of the charter boat captain Quint is among the most indelible characters in cinematic history. Book-Quint is terrible, a foul-mouthed, one-dimensional old salt who is more of a hustler chasing green than an Ahab chasing a creature from the deep. This is important, because the endgame of both book and novel resolve around Brody, Quint, and Hooper sharing a small boat on the big sea. Benchley’s inability to find any interesting interactions between the three men keeps the book from reaching any dramatic climax. (The book’s only climax occurs when…oh, never mind). Instead, the story drags and sputters on a downward course, until it staggers to an abrupt and entirely unfulfilling end.

It would be overly glib to say that the best character in Jaws is the Great White Shark. It would also be true. However, I mean that with all due respect. The shark is an amazing creation. It is relentless and frightening; its intellect is almost supernatural; its intent borders on the psychopathic. The shark is like Michael Meyers, before Rod Zombie overanalyzed Michael Meyers to the point of boredom. Hiding beneath the waves, a remorseless machine that has evolved to hunt, kill, and eat, the shark is a compelling, mysterious, dread-evoking presence. It should have driven the story from its first memorable appearance. Instead, it disappears for long stretches, and not because, as in the movie, it had a mechanical breakdown.

When the shark is gone, we are left with a shallow and tawdry tale of rather unlikable humans making a wreckage of their lives. It gets to a point where you don’t just miss the shark’s dramatic momentum, but you start to root for him to somehow get on shore and make an entrance at that interminable dinner party.