Jaws by Peter Benchley: A Book Review

A good book, but also a rare case where the film is better than the source material.

Synopsis

Jaws was published in February 1974. The fictional resort town of Amity, on Long Island, is in trouble. A great white shark has taken up residence in its waters and is eating people. The local police chief, Martin Brody, wants to close the beaches. The mayor, mindful of the town’s fragile tourist economy, does not. Not to mention the organised crime/real estate investors hanging on a thread. What follows is a battle between public safety and economic necessity, punctuated by shark attacks, a disintegrating marriage, an affair, organised crime, real estate corruption, and one unsettling dead baby dolphin. Eventually, Brody, marine biologist Matt Hooper, and shark hunter Quint take a boat out to find the shark.

My review

Jaws was sold to publisher Doubleday on the basis of a single page. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown secured the film rights before the book was even published, paying Universal $150,000. The paperback rights went to Bantam for $575,000. The book spent 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and had 9 million copies in print by the time the film was released in June 1975. A young Steven Spielberg came across an early copy in Zanuck’s office and read it over a single weekend. He was instantly hooked. The resulting film became the first to gross over $100 million at the box office and is widely credited with inventing the summer blockbuster. Something similar happened two decades later when Spielberg optioned Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park before its publication. Working titles included The Stillness in the Water, Leviathan Rising, and What’s That Noshin’ on My Laig? Quint, the grizzled shark hunter, is thought to be based on Frank Mundus, a real shark fisherman from Montauk, New York, who was notorious for his brutal methods and his contempt for the sport fishing establishment. The character is more developed in the novel than the film has time to explore. Benchley later came to regret what Jaws did to public perception of sharks. In a 2000 interview, he said: “What I now know, which wasn’t known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh. No one appreciates how vulnerable they are to destruction.” He spent the rest of his life as a marine conservationist. Jaws (the novel) is richer, messier, and more morally complicated than the film. The town of Amity is not simply a community under threat from a shark. It is a community under pressure from organised crime, from real estate corruption, from the deep tension between the islanders who depend on wealthy summer visitors and resent every one of them. Locals who need the money and are simultaneously contemptuous of the people who bring it. None of this is in the film, and the film is arguably better for its absence. The subplot I found most distracting is Ellen Brody’s affair with Hooper. Ellen married Brody partly as an act of rebellion against her affluent upbringing and has spent years wondering if she regrets that decision. When Hooper, educated, moneyed, and from her former world, arrives, old feelings resurface. An affair happens. It is not glamorous. It is the act of a woman who misses who she used to be, swept up in nostalgia and regret. It’s interesting and it does enrich the novel, making the characters more realised, more complex, but it pulled me away from the shark, and much like the movie: that’s what I was there for. The POV shifts between third person limited and omniscient in a way that is occasionally jarring, but not too serious as to make the book less readable. The shark sequences are tense, and still thrilling all these years later, particularly when we have the fish’s POV. Four stars.

What I liked / what I didn’t

What I liked

• The shark sequences are gritty and fantastic, written with a cold efficiency.
• The world of Amity is richly textured.
• The backstory and publishing history are fascinating in their own right.

What I didn’t

• The Ellen/Hooper affair pulls the reader away from the shark.
• The subplots add texture, but they ultimately work against the book’s greatest strength, which is the shark, and the film’s decision to strip most of them out produced a tighter, more focused, arguably better piece of storytelling. It is unusual to say the adaptation improved on the source, but here I think it did.

Final verdict

Jaws is a very good novel that was turned into a great film. The book is richer, messier, and more morally complicated than the film. If you have seen the film, the book will surprise you with what Spielberg left out. If you have not seen the film (I’m excited for you), read this first, then watch it and notice what has changed. Four stars. And if you take one thing from this review: the film is better. I say that with enormous respect for the book.