In the second chapter of Jaws - which ends with the discovery of the remains of the first victim - Benchley inches his narrative forward, but is more interested in building the back-story and attempting to develop 'local colour'. Over fourteen pages we are given a breakdown of Amity's police roster and a complete history of Martin and Ellen Brody's relationship - the former presented through the character of Patrolman Hendricks, the latter detailed by an all-knowing authorial voice.
This approach was - and still is - typical of the popular novel, and when done well - as in the best of Stephen King - can build up an effective interaction between individuals and the community they live in. Benchley does it with a heavy hand, spreading the local colour a little too thickly. Where the screenplay establishes the Brody marriage with a jokey exchange in the bedroom, the novel rakes up the couple's entire past, signposting it along the way with indications of the feeling of dissatisfaction that will eventually point Ellen in the direction of infidelity.
Spielberg went on record as saying that none of the characters in the book were very likeable, and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Jaws the novel is not a 'feel-good' book in the way that Jaws the film is a 'feel-good' movie, and had the filmmakers been more faithful to the book's tone, I think it unlikely that they would have had a blockbuster on their hands. But the mean-spirited nature of the original does capture something of the time, when America was losing a war, and about to lose a President to corruption.
The discovery of the first victim's remains on the beach prompts one of the books most unusual images when Hendricks looks down at the "mass of tattered flesh" that has been washed up in the surf and thinks that "the woman's remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book".
Hendricks's reaction on discovering the grisly flotsam is to vomit, and this seems a realistic detail. Where the film naturally only implies this, Benchley almost revels in it and ransacks the thesaurus for alternative words and phrases ( "he vomited .... spilled his guts into the sand .... retch ..... he had stopped puking .... his breathing rattled with phlegm .... he felt bile rise in his throat...").
Whether by design or not, Benchley here introduces a vomiting motif that - along with its obverse eating motif - punctuates the narrative. In Chapter 3, when Brody discusses the shark victim over lunch with Harry Meadows, the two motifs come together in one sentence: "Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag." In the dinner party scene of Chapter 7 Brody experiences the same sensation: "He had started to chew a piece of meat when another wave of nausea hit him." In Chapter 12, on the second day of the hunt, Hooper's reaction on seeing the shark is described in terms of a guttural response: "What he saw sucked from him a throaty grunt ...".
Just as the shark chews up and spits out its victims, so some of the novel's human characters are subjected to a metaphorical mastication. Larry Vaughn by his mob partners, Martin Brody by the fear of being cuckolded.
