Reel & Read: Jaws!

Our book today is Peter Benchley's mega-bestselling 1974 novel Jaws, which was subsequently made into an obscure art-house film some of you may have seen. That film caused three horrible things to happen (well, four if you count prompting millions of people to go sit in dark movie theaters instead of taking a walk in Central Park): it made every single person in the Western world permanently terrified of swimming - or even wading past knee-deep - in the ocean, any ocean; it declared an open season on the killing of sharks which hasn't lessened in fervor in the last forty years, even though most species of large shark are now all but extinct; and it took a wrecking-ball to the writing career of its author, who was capable of good work and might have been capable of great work (his father and grandfather certainly were) but who instead will be known forever only as "the author of Jaws." Those are three heavy indictments to lay at the feet of a movie, but despite its gazillion readers, the book is largely innocent.

I'm turning my attention to the book today even though I wrote about it only (!) two or so years ago here. The reason? Why, because my "Reel & Read" partner in crime, Mr. Anderson, has decided to take time out from his wall-to-wall schedule reviewing new-release movies in order to take in Steven Spielberg's super-hit again, and I really don't need much excuse to revisit this novel.

Last time, as some you may recall, I brought up the parts of Benchley's novel that were not only effective but essentially impossible to capture on film. In retrospect this seems to me a snotty and short-sighted assertion: of course virtually anything that can be conveyed in prose can be conveyed on film, if the film-maker has some talent and puts his mind to it. Re-reading Jaws for this post, I could easily picture all of it being filmed - but the book is in so many ways so different from the Spielberg movie that I found myself imagining the unimaginable: a "Jaws" remake directed by somebody else. That somebody else might decide to stick closer to the actual plot of the novel, in which there's a lot more subtlety and land-based goings-on than makes it to the screen.

I read the novel before I saw the movie (I remember its original, dorky cover), and re-reading it has reminded me of all those goings-on. In the novel, ichthyologist Matt Hooper is still the idealistic nature-lover who can blurt out things like "Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful - God, now beautiful they are! They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth" (apparently, Benchley's Hooper isn't much of a reader, or he'd know not ever to say such things in a book ... it's just bound to, er, bite you) - but he's also a stuck-up little prick quite a lot of the time, one who happily goes along when a distraught Ellen Brody awkwardly approaches him about having an affair. She and Hooper meet at a restaurant safely up the coast from Amity, the Long Island beach town where Ellen's husband is chief of police, and the scene that follows, in which they fantasize aloud about what they'd like to do to each other, certainly wouldn't be impossible to film - but it would sure as hell be impossible for Spielberg to film. I doubt he could even understand the words on the page.

Benchley is expertly parsimonious with words, when he's narrating such hard-edged, adult scenes. There's one excrutiating sequence where Ellen throws a small dinner party and Chief Brody, broiling with resentments he can only half-name, proceeds to get very nearly drunk enough to torpedo the whole evening. Benchley keeps the narrative focus tightly on Brody, and yet there's no sympathy in the action at all ... the reader hears all of Brody's internal complaints and justifications and yet is never moved to empathy, is horrified the whole time by how he's behaving. It's expertly done: it's a shame so many readers probably missed it while thumbing forward looking for the next shark-attack scene.

Naturally, this being a work of prose not film, there's a good deal more straightforward exposition than any action-movie could support - including a scientific digression (by Hooper, of course) that might ring some bells for modern readers:

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"

Fortunately, thanks to later masterpieces, readers in 2011 need not wonder about such things (although they might wonder how such a careful researcher as Benchley could get his archeological time-tables so scrunched up) - nor, indeed, does the book itself ponder on them for any length of time. Instead, it unfurls its various plot-lines with careful skill, including one plot-line that owes everything to what a certain wind-bag once described as the anxiety of influence. In the book, it turns out that Larry Vaughan, Amity's mayor, has a clear-cut motive for insisting that Chief Brody open the town's beaches even though two people have died, and his motive is cinematic: he's in debt up to his eyeballs to ... the Mafia!

That would be more or less the same Mafia that starred in the book-world's previous mega-bestseller, Mario Puzo's The Godfather from 1969. That novel had done the ultimate magic trick in the publishing world: it had become its own currency, an immediate part of every single Western individual's functioning cerebellum. Long before the Harry Potter books or The Da Vinci Code or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it had become a cultural phenomenon - and that phenomenon was quadrupled by the 1972 movie. Peter Benchley would have been something more than human if he hadn't hoped, at least in some part of his heart, that someday he could write a book that would do the same thing.

He did exactly that. He squeezed the not-so-innocent town of Amity between a feckless mayor who needs to keep the beaches open if he's ever going to repay his mobster 'partners' and a remorseless predator prowling beyond the surf. And it's not just Larry Vaughan: most of the characters here (with the notable exception of Quint, who's every bit as ridiculous a figure in the novel as in the movie, but who's at least graced in the movie by an indelible performance by Robert Shaw) are caught between the lone shark and the loan shark, and none more than Ellen Brody, who belatedly comes to regret her fling with Matt Hooper:

As she pondered what Vaughan had said, she began to recognize the richness of her life: a relationship with Brody was more rewarding than any Larry Vaughan would ever experience; an amalgam of minor trials and tiny triumphs that, together, added up to something akin to joy. And as her recognition grew, so did her regret that it had taken her so long to see the waste of time and emotion in trying to cling to her past. Suddenly she felt fear - fear that she was growing up too late, that something might happen to Brody before she could savor her awareness.

Nothing happens to Brody, of course - unlike in the movie, he's the sole survivor of the Orca, who returns alone to tell the tale. Benchley's book outsold Puzo's by two or three to one, and then a few years later the movie made from that book out-grossed the movie made from Puzo's by more than twice as much (although, again, you'll have to check with Mr. Anderson to see how it holds up after all these years). And most importantly, Puzo's novel reads like it was written in fifteen minutes by a megalomaniac 15-year-old, whereas Peter Benchley - may he rest in the deep - wrote a really good book, an almost perfect intelligent summer-read, provided you're not on a raft at sea.

The Deep!

Our book today is the 1976 novel The Deep, and it's the answer to a question several of you have emailed me (because Gawd forbid any of you shy little buggers should, you know, post a comment or anything)(this has got to be the strangest blogger/reader relationship I know of - par for the course in my life, actually): did Peter Benchley ever write anything worth reading other than Jaws?

The answer is problematic, and it connects with a long-held belief of mine, which is that novelists very, very often write more than is good for them. I firmly believe that virtually everybody has one genuinely good book inside them, and I love the fact that typing, editing, and even publishing technology has become so easy and ubiquitous that hundreds of thousands more people than in, say, the 1960s can go a lot further toward actually writing that book than they could at any other time in history. Writing schools abound, writing groups populate the back booths of every Bickford's and Denny's from here to Costa Mesa, and of course the entire Internet is one gigantic, horrifyingly diverse exercise in writing. The making of many books has never been easier, and that's a good thing.

The problem is - and always has been, even before FicPro 2000 and the like - that once somebody actually writes a book, two powerful factors often propel them to write another. The first of these factors is inborn and intangible, but that doesn't necessarily make it right: it's intoxicating. Creating a fictional world, shaping it, populating it, driving that population - it's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't done it, but everybody who has done it will understand immediately. Crafting that creation, going inside it day after day, gradually orchestrating it to tell the stories you want it to tell, and then, when you're finished, writing 'the end' ... well, as difficult as it'll be for you non-writers to believe, there's really no feeling in the world that's sweeter. Once you do it, you very much want to do it again - whether you have the inspiration, industry, or information to make it work a second (or twenty-second) time.

The second factor is crass and therefore well-known: if you make money writing a novel, chances are very good you'll want to make even more money writing a second, and a third. Writers have often been contractually obligated to keep writing, even though, in my opinion, 99 percent of writers don't have much more than one worthwhile book inside them. Generally, that's the fiction math: one book that's wholly yours, irresistibly burning inside you to get out, to be expressed, and then maybe 20 percent material overspill that can, if stretched and fluffed, be made into a second novel that will more or less stand upright. Usually, everything else is dry humping.

There are exceptions, of course - probably you're thinking of the same exceptions I am. But keep in mind, if you can (and let's be honest here: I'm probably in a better position to do that than most of you are), the absolutely VAST amount of novels that have been published in the last 200 years. The number beggars description; trust me, the exceptions we're thinking of sink into that sea without even the smallest ripple. For every Tolstoy writing both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, there are, without exaggeration, 4 or 5 million one-hit wonders grinding out their fifteenth soulless book.

Benchley's fiction-writing career is a pretty close example of what I'm talking about. In Jaws he found his one perfect idea and knocked it out of the park - a giant killer shark preys on a popular beachfront community, thereby unleashing all kinds of predation between the humans involved. Almost everything he wrote after that book feels grasping, attenuated, and incomplete.

Almost everything. He, too, had that roughly 20 percent overspill, and he used it to craft an older manuscript into the adventure novel called The Deep, which is the only one of his novels other than Jaws that's worth reading. It's the story of a honeymooning couple in Bermuda - David Sanders and his much younger wife Gail, who while scuba-diving come across the wreck of a reef-torn ship and find not only WWII-era ampules of some sort of drug but also much, much older artifacts. Wondering what exactly it is they've found, they're directed by helpful locals to crusty old lighthouse keeper Romer Treece, who comes off as a slightly more eloquent version of Captain Quint:

The bottom of the sea is a living creature. She's whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That's happened. And we've had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.

But whatever native strength Benchley had as a storyteller is already beginning to weaken in this book, and the narrative quickly crowds up with predictability, including a slick villain - Henri Cloche - who sounds like he's reading his dialogue straight out of an old MGM handbook:

"They [the couple's motorbikes] will be returned in the morning. A final word: Make no mistake about it - should you still be inclined to be ... hasty ... and go to the authorities, you will find that, officially, I do not exist. And should you try to get out of this by leaving Bermuda, you will also discover that, in reality, I exist everywhere." His back stiffened. "There will be no haven."

What he wants Sanders and his wife to do, Mr. Bond, is dive ... dive the wreck and recover as much of its cargo as possible, for which service he will pay them one million dollars (which was a lot of money back then, as they say). You can probably guess the rest yourself, but the key here is to remember that all the movies and TV shows and Scott Smith novels this plot reminds you of came from this book, not the other way around. The plot itself - innocents find something deadly in a shipwreck and become morally compromised by it - is rock-solid. It's only Benchley's ability to fully exploit it as a writer that's flagging just a bit.

Just a bit. The Deep will still work on you - it's sharply, leanly told, and it will pull you in, and you'll be glad you gave it the lazy afternoon it takes to read it (like Jaws, it's very much a book you should read in one sitting). It's fathoms and fathoms better than all of Benchley's later books (they at best have only scattered worthwhile scenes, and sometimes only scattered worthwhile moments) - but it's no Anna Karenina, alas.

Jaws!

Our book today is Peter Benchley's 1974 mega-bestseller Jaws, which was flying out of bookstores even before it was turned into a damn fine movie and given one of the single most world-famous cover illustrations any book has ever carried.

The story is roughly the same: a great white shark homes in on the peaceful little summer vacation town of Amity and begins a pattern of tightly focused feeding on humans. The plot is just that simple: what happens if a shark decides to do that? And the gimmick driving the plot is equally simple: this great white shark is huge (and, in the book and even more in the movie, seems oddly bright, despite Benchley's repeated scientific assurances throughout the novel that it's a dumb creature of pure instinct).

The town elders of Amity don't want to hurt their summer rentals by announcing the presence of a killer shark off their beaches, and at first they manage to convince Police Chief Brody not only to cover up the cause of the mysterious deaths cropping up offshore but also to keep the beaches open for swimmers. It's only once the attacks continue that Brody is forced to act on his conscience, and Benchley does a very good job of portraying the way the tension begins to eat at Brody's relationship with his wife Ellen:

"You'll wake the children."

"I don't give a damn. I'm not going to let you stand there and work out your own hang-ups by telling me I'm a shit."

Ellen smiled bitterly. "You see? There you go again."

"Where do I go again? What are you talking about?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Just like that. You don't want to talk about it. Look ... okay, I was wrong about the goddam meat. I shouldn't have blown my stack. I'm sorry. Now ..."

"I said I don't want to talk about it!"

Brody was ready for a fight, but he backed off, sober enough to realize that his only weapons were cruelty and innuendo, and that Ellen was close to tears. And tears, whether shed in orgasm or in anger, disconcerted him. So he said only, "Well, I'm sorry about that." He walked out of the kitchen and climbed the stairs.

In the bedroom, as he was undressing, the thought occurred to him that the cause of all the unpleasantness, the source of the whole mess, was a fish: a mindless beast that he had never seen. The ludicrousness of the thought made him smile.

He crawled into bed and, almost simultaneous with the touch of his head to the pillow, fell into a dreamless sleep.

In the novel, the town hires the crusty old shark-catcher Quint to deal with the problem, and Brody brings in Matt Hooper, whose brother used to date Ellen years ago in her life before she married Brody (a life she looks upon wistfully even while she chastises herself for doing so). Quint is as pure and simple a predator as the fish he's chasing, and Hooper has predatory designs of his own - on Ellen Brody. One of the notes Benchley strikes over and over throughout the book is that the "great fish" marauding out in the ocean is just a cleaner, more honest physical manifestation of the kind of cold-blooded hunting that goes on everywhere. Jaws is thickly populated by sharks - and only one of them lives in the ocean.

Benchley, a life-long ocean-goer and frequent visitor to Nantucket, fills his book unobtrusively but plentifully with shark-lore, and some of the most effective moments in Jaws are descriptions of the shark itself, its motions, its sensory world. This is a much, much stronger novel than it's usually given credit for being - not only Benchley's masterpiece but a fine addition to the 'men and the sea' sub-genre whose Everest is Moby Dick.

I've recommended Jaws to countless people, and doubtless I've personally given a copy to many of you reading this. If so (and even if not), you'll have heard me make one of my favorite points about the book: there are many scenes in it that are not only superior to anything found in the blockbuster movie but superior to anything that could be filmed. There are dreads, agonies, and swift little moments that defy cinematography - but good, lean prose can capture them if it's smart enough to know where they are.

Take the book's opening scene. It's the same as in the movie - a young man and woman go down to the beach in the hour before dawn, and she goes for an impromptu swim. Her strokes in the water attract the attention of the shark a hundred yards offshore, and it closes in on her movements. The movie harrowingly depicts her death-agonies, because that's what it can show us. In the novel, there's no such struggle - she feels a sharp tug on her leg, reaches down with groping fingers in the dark water and feels that her foot is missing, that bone is protruding (pain hasn't hit her yet). She screams, but in the next instant the shark catapults up from directly beneath her and instantly destroys her with a couple of enormous bites.

But the genius of the scene is in the delicate moment right before this:

The fish closed on the woman and hurtled past, a dozen feet to the side and six feet below the surface. The woman felt only a wave of pressure that seemed to lift her up in the water and ease her down again. She stopped swimming and held her breath. Feeling nothing further, she resumed her lurching stroke.

The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations - erratic and sharp - signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. A series of tremors shook its body.

For the first time, the woman felt fear, though she did not know why. Adrenaline shot through her trunk and her limbs, generating a tingling heat and urging her to swim faster. She guessed that she was fifty yards from shore. She could see the line of white foam where the waves broke on the beach. She saw the lights in the house, and for a comforting moment, she thought she saw someone pass by one of the windows.

Putting us so heartbreakingly inside her head in the moments before she dies (or letting us hear Brody's mirthless, contradictory little chuckle in his bedroom alone) - is something Benchley the novelist can do - and does often in Jaws - that no movie director can duplicate or would want to. Its a good reason to find a 20 cent thrift store copy of Jaws and give yourself a good afternoon's read. Given the recent world-wide rise in shark attacks, you'd be crazy to go swimming in the ocean anyway ... so why not enjoy yourself on land?