The victims of the two shark attacks that occur in Chapter Four are a young boy of six and an old man of sixty five. The boy's death - which would provide the basis for the film's most visually inventive scene - is described in grisly detail, but before we get to it we have to wade through several paragraphs of social commentary. Benchley worked as an editor for Newsweek in the mid Sixties and so it's not surprising that his authorial voice should take on the patronising tone of a magazine trend piece.
Amity's summer visitors are described as a single herd and Benchley freely employs the third person pronoun to lump them together. The husbands are "semi-comatose" on beach towels whilst beside them their wives seem to be drinking themselves into a vermouth stupor. The teenagers are laid out in "tight, symmetrical rows", the boys "grinding their pelvises into the sand" as the girls tease them. The image seems to echo the couple's "urgent ardor on the cold sand" in the opening chapter.
Benchley suggests that privilege has granted them a physical perfection. Their teeth, unlike those of the shark prowling the shallows just yards away, are "straight and white and even." Their minds have been calibrated to a point of perfect indifference that allows them to ignore the imperfections of the world around them. Here Benchley delivers a scatter shot of social issues (race riots, eco-pollution, police corruption, soaring crime rates, food contamination, and the potentially damaging effects of hexachlorophene), no doubt ticking all the boxes that preoccupied American society in 1973.
The narrative gets back on track with a six year old boy persuading his mother to let him go out on his raft. We learn only his first name - Alex - although, just as the victim in the first chapter was simply called 'the woman', he too is depersonalised and referred to as 'the boy'. In describing the attack Benchley employs the same technique of alternating points of view (fish / boy / fish / boy) culminating in a series of sentences that run more or less parallel to those of the first chapter:
Chrissie
"The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water."
Alex
"The fish's head drove the raft out of the water."
Chrissie
"The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly."
Alex
"The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft."
Chrissie
"...most of the pieces of the corpse had dispersed. A few sank slowly, coming to rest on the sandy bottom, where they moved lazily in the current."
Alex
"The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom."
Benchley rings in some changes with the third attack by describing it through the character of Hendricks, who details it in almost Hemingway-like prose, leaning heavily on the use of the conjunction and to provide cohesion:
"He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again."
In a less Hemingway-like simile Hendricks adds, "That's the biggest fuckin' fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin' station wagon."
The third victim, later named as Morris Cater, never made it to the movie. Indeed, Chapter Four marks the point where book and film begin to diverge and move along parallel narrative tracks. However, there is an old man who gets trampled in the surf during the Fourth of July panic, and I always like to imagine that his name was Morris.
