Don't Go Into The Water. . .

***SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Jaws is my all-time favorite movie. It came out the year I was born and so I suppose I developed a special connection to it from the very beginning due to our shared birth years. Now, in all that time, for no good reason, I never read the novel. Not until now.

Steven Spielberg's film is vastly different from Peter Benchley's shark story in crucial ways. You do have Brody and his wife Ellen, Matt Hooper and Quint, but the roles they play are, in many ways, significantly altered in the film. For instance, I was shocked to discover that Ellen and Hooper have an affair What?! If this were to have taken place in the movie, her character would have been pretty unlikable. The affair is actually reminiscent of Donna Trenton's in Cujo. Add to that a subsequent layer of tension between Brody, who suspects something but isn't quite sure, and Hooper, which changes the dynamics a little bit on their shark venture. There is no camaraderie between the two men, so that fun and humorous connection is missing in the book. Also, the Mayor is tied up in the Mafia, owing them a real estate investment. WOW! AND, that whole awesome presentation Quint delivers by scratching the chalkboard--gone, because the entire conversation takes place over the phone between him and Brody instead. You don't even get the awesome line "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat", much less any of the other cool lines spoken throughout. What a bummer. What about the "Tired and I wanna go to bed" song? Nope.

So, like I said, the novel is HUGELY different. Brody has a major mouth of F-bombs on him, though otherwise he feels about the same, Ellen is disloyal, so no "Let's get drunk and fool around" emitting from her, and Hooper is a douche canoe.

Is the novel good? It's all right. There's not too much action or focus on the shark though; that is, you don't have the visual appeal of it until the last quarter of the story. I definitely wanted more of that.