The book delves into the residents of Amity in more depth than the film, but none of it is very interesting. Amity is a small town of about a thousand year-round residents, with the population increasing to around ten thousand during the summer. The year-round residents depend on the summer crowds to sustain them through the rest of the year, so when the pesky shark starts dining on tourists and Sheriff Brody is forced to close the beaches, it could spell doom for the town. The book does a good job setting this up, but adds two hugely unnecessary subplots, one simply boring and the other horrendously offensive on just about every level. We’ll start with the boring one. In the movie, the mayor of Amity, Larry Vaughan, is a slimy fellow who wears
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The stuff about the mayor’s mob ties may be boring but at least it’s not offensive. All of that is about to change. The book’s other major subplot involves Chief Brody’s wife, Ellen. Ellen came from a wealthy family, the kind of family who lives in Amity during the summer. She’s constantly thinking about her past, and even though she loves her husband, she can’t help but feel occasionally that she married below her station. All of this is iffy, but here’s where it goes off the rails. Once Hooper shows up, the two of them proceed to have one of the most appallingly offensive conversations I have ever read in any book in my entire life, and I read a lot of books. She tells him about how she misses her family, and misses some of the circles she used to be a part of when she was younger. A bit odd to be sharing something so personal with someone you barely know, but all right. Then she starts telling him about what she fantasizes about. Uh-oh. She tells him she fantasizes about being raped. Aaaaand you’ve lost me. But it goes on. They proceed to have a detailed conversation about, if the two of them were to hook up, how they would do it. Which they then enact. And the entire sordid enterprise ends in a graphic sex scene between the two of them. That’s because he suspects Hooper of sleeping with Ellen. But then Hooper gets eaten by the shark, and Brody paddles back to shore at the end of the novel without ever finding out
The stuff about the mayor’s mob ties may be boring but at least it’s not offensive. All of that is about to change. The book’s other major subplot involves Chief Brody’s wife, Ellen. Ellen came from a wealthy family, the kind of family who lives in Amity during the summer. She’s constantly thinking about her past, and even though she loves her husband, she can’t help but feel occasionally that she married below her station. All of this is iffy, but here’s where it goes off the rails. Once Hooper shows up, the two of them proceed to have one of the most appallingly offensive conversations I have ever read in any book in my entire life, and I read a lot of books. She tells him about how she misses her family, and misses some of the circles she used to be a part of when she was younger. A bit odd to be sharing something so personal with someone you barely know, but all right. Then she starts telling him about what she fantasizes about. Uh-oh. She tells him she fantasizes about being raped. Aaaaand you’ve lost me. But it goes on. They proceed to have a detailed conversation about, if the two of them were to hook up, how they would do it. Which they then enact. And the entire sordid enterprise ends in a graphic sex scene between the two of them. That’s because he suspects Hooper of sleeping with Ellen. But then Hooper gets eaten by the shark, and Brody paddles back to shore at the end of the novel without ever finding out