Jaws

By Peter Benchley

In 1971, a man named Peter Benchley was desperate for a book sale. While working various freelance writing jobs to support his family, his agent arranged countless meetings with book publishers where he'd sometimes pitch as many as three ideas in one sitting.

Many were unimpressed, but a man named Thomas Congdon of Doubleday took an interest in a plot he pitched about a man-eating shark terrorizing a beach resort. He offered Benchley a $1,000 in advance money.

Over the next three years, he'd help Benchley toil over his pages with countless rewrites until they were certain they had it right, even paying such close attention to the title that one wasn't selected until the final hours before the manuscript was due to hit the presses. On February of 1974, they published the book and, in doing so, not only revived Benchley's career but gave the world a new household name in terror.

Jaws.

Now, my first impression reading the background of its publication after reading the novel is that this book definitely reflects its circumstances. While every character in the novel seems desperate for something, the prose itself also has a slight after-taste of desperation to it. As though Benchley had been growing weary after all his editing. He creates beautiful terror from the opening chapter with wasting no opportunity to educate his readers about the anatomy of the shark and about ocean life overall.

Where he specifically falters is in structural execution, laying out his tale with concrete categories marking sections of focus rather than choosing to blend them together into clever layers that reveal themselves gradually. That being said, this is a first-time novel, and there is something to be said for learning structure the hard way.

Still, I think Benchley's greatest strength in this book is probably his ability to make everyone unlikable on some level and still succeed in making the reader root for the least unlikable (in this case Chief Brody or Quint) whether we want to or not. As someone who once tried this in a story, I can assure you that such a task is no minor feat. It's very easy to make a reader disinterested enough not to want to read at all if there’s not someone to root for more than another character. It’s just the way that it works. And Benchley quite beautifully rolls these bittersweet characters into a twisted situation where so many different things ride on the outcome of one animal's death that it dares us to look at how much power nature still has over us.

Mixed with themes of redemption and desperation, Jaws packs a harder and darker punch than Spielberg could have ever captured on camera. Forget what you may think you know about the movie, and give the book a try. I don't think you'll be sorry, especially if you'd like to study how to write unlikable characters.