Ah, Summer, the season of the mass-market paperback, the time for bookstores to stack seven dollar guilty pleasures on a table with a hand-lettered sign that says “Beach Reading”.
Whether you’ll be shaking sand out of the pages or not, that’s the perfect two-word term for any of those softcovers with their watercolor illustrations and embossed lettering, the ones that are somehow harder to justify when the temperatures are frozen in the low double-digits.
I was actually at the beach last week and nipped into Borders long enough to grab a piece of brain candy and—since I was near the ocean—I thought Peter Benchley’s 1974 gorefest Jaws was an excellent selection. Obviously nothing is more comforting than dipping your feet in the water while you tear through endless paragraphs about a devil fish.
I read the book as a kid and my recollection of it was tangled with scenes from the Spielberg flick, save for the sex paragraphs which had seared themselves into my pre-pubescent memories. Jaws had to be the first book I’d ever read that was even remotely saucy, since Nancy Drew rarely investigatied The Mystery of Ned Nickerson’s Button Front Khakis.
Anyway, everyone knows the main idea and--if for some reason you don’t--the cover art showing a massive great white shark open mouthed and displaying several rows of Julia Roberts-style teeth should tip you off. But what I’d forgotten—or maybe never comprehended—is that there’s more to the story than just a fish that makes a buffet out of a beachside community.
There is a serious class struggle taking place between the “summer people” who vacation on Amity Island and the year-round residents who feed on the dollars spent from May to August, like two-legged remora on the back of, well, a shark.
This distinction causes for more than a little tension between blue collar Sheriff Brody and Lacoste-wearing oceanographer Matt Hooper who have very different ideas on how to handle the fish. The fact that Hooper’s hot for Brody’s wife doesn’t help and the tension between them builds until you’re ready for Brody to knock Matt out of his Topsiders.
The book is divided into three parts and the opener wastes no time introducing the dorsal-finned villain; By page 5, he’d already snacked on the skinny dipper from the cover art. Part Two is more nuanced as the major characters are forced to confront not only the beast beneath the ocean surface, but to explore their desires and motivations which—in some cases—is equally terrifying and infinitely harder to escape. I won’t spoil Part Three but everything eventually, ahem, comes to the surface. Yes, water puns are my favorite.
Author Peter Benchley definitely has a scientist’s eye which serves him well for the fishing scenes and kingdom/phylum classifications but sometimes proves clumsy on dry land, especially in the bedroom. Those sex scenes I thought I remembered so vividly are as clunky as they are clinical. I’m not sure when I’ve seen that many uses of the word “pudenda” and hope it’s not etched on my corneas again any time soon.
Despite being the title creature, the shark swims through maybe a dozen of the 278 pages and the lung-breathers carry the rest of the action. Upon his first reading, eventual Jaws director Steven Spielberg didn’t think any of the characters were sympathetic enough and was actively cheering for the Great White.
There were a lot of people to dislike but I dug Sheriff Brody and his attempts to confront threats from all sides, including the shark, the sketchy mayor who dared him to close the beaches, and Matt Hooper who was edging in on his wife.
I found a lot of pathos between those paper covers. And a lot of blood too…what more could you want out of your Beach Reading?