If you don’t know, here on Dive to Escape, I am on a quest to read every academic book on sharks and the people who research them and provide us with their information. Time and time again, when I read about these researchers, the movie Jaws frequently comes up as one of their greatest influences. This has been the case for people like James Cameron, Greg Skomal, and Dr. Chris Harvey-Clark. Now, I have seen the Jaws movie and love it—even though I root for the shark every time. I even like Jaws Part 2 better because we get more shark time. So, I felt like I should read the book that inspired the movie. Often in my past experiences, books are always way better than the movie, and I was looking forward to Jaws being just as good.
As someone who rarely reads fiction, I was comfortable reading Jaws because I had seen the movie several times—I actually grew up watching the movie—so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. Full transparency: I didn’t read the book; I listened to the audio version. For that, I am grateful I didn’t waste more time reading it.
Jaws, the book, is made up of 14 chapters. The first two describe a typical wealthy beach town where, one summer, a shark shows up and kills three people unexpectedly. One of the attacks is a graphic event involving a 7-year-old. The main character, the town police chief Martin Brody, wants to close the beaches and investigate what’s going on. However, a mysterious character from the local newspaper, who also represents powerful people in town, intervenes, leading to more deaths.
As the story unfolds, the book takes an unexpected turn, shifting focus from the shark to deep character development. For the next ten chapters, we dive into the personal lives of several townspeople, including Brody’s wife, Ellen, who embarks on an affair with Matt Hooper, the scientist who arrives to help understand the shark attacks. There’s also a subplot involving the town’s corrupt mayor, Larry Vaughn, whose financial interests conflict with closing the beaches, adding to the town’s mounting tension.
Another unexpected element in the book is the inclusion of several graphic sex scenes. While I am neither for nor against sex scenes in literature, they were quite unexpected, given what I remembered from the movie. These scenes were graphically detailed and seemed out of place in what I thought would be a shark thriller.
Finally, in the last two chapters, the shark makes a comeback, terrorizing a few more people before it’s eventually caught. The climactic battle between the shark and the three men—Brody, Hooper, and the shark hunter Quint—results in most of the main characters dying, except for Brody. This ending is quite different from the movie, where the resolution is more heroic and less tragic.
I would have to say that Steven Spielberg can never get enough credit for what he made the movie into from the book. I did some reading for this article, and it looks like the original author, Peter Benchley, was also the screenwriter. I would say they did an outstanding job with the movie relative to the book. Personally, the book didn’t read as a mystery thriller about a shark. It read more like a dramatic summer story of a beach town where everyone is doing drugs and sleeping with each other while trying to maintain appearances, with a few shark attacks thrown in.
I would give this book 1 star out of 5, as it basically had nothing to do with sharks—thriller or not—and wasted a lot of my time with typical human drama that I didn’t need to read in a book.
Please bear in mind that this review is from someone with very little patience for fiction and who almost exclusively reads natural history non-fiction. I am currently working through reading every academic book on sharks.
If you are looking for a review of the book from a book lover, not a shark dive enthusiast, click here.