the deep, Peter Benchley

I don't know why I wanted to read a book by the author of Jaws.  It was still winter, and I was back from Florida but wanted to pretend I was still there.  I thought The Deep would be jaunty and entertaining and maybe a little scary.  It did help keep warmth and sun and sea and sand in my mind, but it wasn't such a good book.  It wasn't very jaunty.

One of my main complaints is that the book is almost nothing but fantasy, and fantasy is very boring.  I can't think of anything more boring than other people's fantasies.  Even my own fantasies don't always hold my attention.  This is, I like to think, why I insist on having nightmares every night.  The hero of The Deep is a middle-aged man who has left his wife to marry a woman twenty years younger who prefers sex to argument.  He's in good shape, of course.  Several times he notes his taut belly and full head of hair in a mirror.  When he does have trouble with his new wife, it's because she thinks he's too daring.  By the end of the book he has discovered a sunken treasure, which will all belong to him and his young wife since all the other characters are dead.  He has also blown up several thousand vials of morphine, presumably destroying a coral reef and getting millions of fish really stoned.

This isn't a self-conscious book, which is precisely why the fantasy in it fails.  I could have suffered this fool if the author had a little bit of his tongue in his cheek.  If Benchley is trying to mock, he's not getting the tone right.

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