When Peter Benchley's first novel reached The New York Times bestseller list (where it stayed for almost a year), the author was joining a select club of popular writers who could count their readers in millions. Although it was not strictly a Seventies phenomenon, the bestseller was an integral part of the pop culture landscape of the time. Some authors - like Erich Segal, Richard Bach and William Peter Blatty - earned their place in the pantheon with a single work (Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Exorcist respectively), while others consistently sold well-crafted but formulaic stories by the million. Harold Robbins published five novels between 1971 and 1979. Frederick Forsyth had an extraordinary first five years with The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and The Dogs of War. Stephen King's seemingly unstoppable run of hits began with Carrie in 1973 and he managed to produce another four major novels (Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand and The Dead Zone) before 1980. King's books, like those of many of his best-selling contemporaries, were weighty tomes, clocking in at five, six or seven hundred pages. The length of many bestsellers meant that they were more suited for transfer to the small screen, and the phenomenal success of the miniseries based on Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man opened the floodgates for TV adaptations.
Benchley's novel is modest in scope compared to the works of some of his contemporaries. In its first edition it ran to 312 pages, and, as the critic quoted on the back of the UK paperback edition attested, it could - at a stretch - be read in a single sitting. Given the Peyton Place quality of its tawdry romantic sub-plot, it is interesting to speculate how the book might have fared as a TV miniseries.
The filmmakers' decided to fillet the story of any narrative element incidental to the shark. Ellen Brody's infidelity, Larry Vaughn's moral disintegration, and the authorial observations on the fragility of the Amity community all had to go in order to serve the simple adventure plot line. Even stripped to the bone, the movie version of Jaws is packed with incident, and, like that other troubled Hollywood production Casablanca, it managed to achieve a sort of narrative perfection in spite of it all.
Benchley's novel provided a road map for Spielberg, and both film and book share many of the same narrative beats. However, they differ significantly in tone. The book leaves behind a sour and rancid taste. At the end of the final chapter, as Brody - alone - kicks towards the shore, there is no sense of triumph. In the movie, Hooper and Brody share a joke as they swim away from the camera, not unlike Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains disappearing into the fog at Casablanca's airport. It's clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
