Jaws, Peter Benchley (1974) Book Review
Jaws, written by Peter Benchley in 1974, has to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. I chose to read Jaws because I’ve seen the movie so many times and wanted a quick, summer-based novel. After reading this masterpiece, I think I’m starting to prefer books over movie adaptations.
Throughout the story, we follow Martin Brody, our main character from the first shark attack investigation to the final destruction of the beast. Brody faces several conflicts, the first (and most important) one being the shark. Other major conflicts he resolves include his unhappy and unsatisfactory marriage with Ellen Brody, constant disagreements with his colleague Matt Hooper, as well as a battle between the mayor of Amity (Larry Vaughn) and Brody about keeping the beaches open for the Fourth of July weekend.
Obviously, Jaws is about a shark that terrorizes the town of Amity Island during the summer of 1974, but that’s not the only theme of the book. There are other moods and themes throughout the story. I personally think another major mood (after Man-vs-Predator) is this overbearing fear factor. There’s a constant feeling of “who’s going to actually win? Is the shark going to eat and terrorize everyone, wiping out the entire town and East Coast?”. This isn’t necessarily a ‘happy’ book… The happy and hopeful feelings that Peter Benchley only gives us a glimpse of are quickly overshadowed by the fact that something is going to go extremely wrong.
If you’ve read the book, this next section will not come as a surprise for you and you might even agree with me about this being one of the best scenes in the entire book. If you haven’t read the book, THIS NEXT SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS. Don’t say I didn’t warn you… read at your own discretion.
Okay, okay, okay. Now for my absolute FAVORITE part of the book, and no, it has absolutely nothing to do with the shark. Let me give you some background leading up to this. Matt Hooper, Martin Brody’s colleague and shark/fish expert, runs into Brody’s wife at a store in town. Mrs. Ellen Brody discovers that Matt is the younger brother of her ‘long lost love’, the man she was with before she married Martin. Naturally, this encounter brings up concealed feelings and memories and Ellen finds herself quite enamored with Mr. Hooper. Shortly after this, she has this not-so-bright idea that her and her husband should host a dinner party with the upper echelons of Amity Island. She grapples with wanting to belong in high society again and honestly resents Martin for “taking her away” from that class.
The dinner scene takes place just right before the middle of the book in chapter 7. This entire chapter had me chuckling at the behavior and confrontation between Ellen and Martin. First off, she has Matt Hooper show up half an hour earlier than the rest of the guests. Does she have a good excuse for this? Absolutely not. Brody notices some type of connection between the two and proceeds to get wasted even before the other guests show up. Things are said, an argument occurs after the guests leave, and Martin realizes how unhappy him and his wife are in their marriage. Like I said, this was one of the funniest parts of the book because, again, the book isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows.
In conclusion, I definitely enjoyed the book more than the movie. How Steven Spielberg was okay with leaving out the dinner scene and Ellen’s affair with Hooper is beyond me. I think the movie might’ve been less boring in the middle had he included the extra drama. I also want to add that this book was totally experimental for Peter Benchley. His idea was to write a story about a man-eating shark because it was so far out of the ordinary. Benchley was fascinated with sharks. He reads hundreds of books about the creatures and he learned that sharks “don’t even like the taste of us, and great whites often spit humans out because they’re too bony and fat-free (compared to seals that is)” (Benchley 4). The author was quite surprised at the success of the book and was able to build awareness for protecting sharks and other marine life.
You can find Jaws on Amazon: https://a.co/d/h5irvv3
Source: Benchley, Peter. Jaws. Doubleday, 1974.