Okay, halfway through Chapter Two I couldn't take it anymore. At first, I was giving Peter Benchley the benefit of the doubt. I was assuming he was in fact poking fun at the self-importance so many cops seem to carry about themselves and that's why it was so seemingly exaggerated with Hendrix.

And then we got to Brody and my god it just kept getting worse. Like, every new sentence just made it worse and worse to where there is simply no possible way that it could be taken any other way than Peter truly thinking and feeling this way about women.

I was hoping to push through to see what Spielberg saw, because the reviews talk a lot about how different the book is from the movie. Then I was curious because other reviews mentioned how it felt more like a town drama than it did a shark horror book, and I wondered if maybe the shark was a metaphor for how these people kept trying to bury these horrible secrets, and that they were always looming threateningly 'just under the surface'.

But I quite literally cannot go on beyond HALFWAY through chapter two. The way Peter writes about women, the immediate assumptions from EVERY male character that the missing woman must have gone off with some strange man to have sex and only after they realize how fucking stupid that sounds are they worried? Or in Hendrix's case, he's more worried over the 'nuisance' a dead body reported by a grandma and child would be rather than there being a fucking dead woman.

It's a product of it's time, yeah. Sure. But even for the 70s this book feels so deeply anti-woman to a deplorable level. To the point where I'm inclined to believe that Peter Benchley is just a piece of shit guy. And I might have thought differently if any of the men did not talk exactly the same way about women. Just one of them not being a sack of shit would have been enough for me to at least think otherwise.