Benchley Shows His Sensitive Side

A couple days back I finished The Girl of the Sea of Cortez by Peter Benchley, the novelist famous for writing Jaws. I have long felt that Jaws the film is quite a bit better than Jaws the book. The movie is full of strange quirks and interesting characters, that come across as stock in the novel. There are also some additional, unappealing subplots in the book that are left out of the movie, to good effect. Anyway, Benchley followed up Jaws (his first novel) with two more ocean related yarns: The Deep and The Island. Both of those were nearly unbearable. Finally we come to The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. As you may be able to tell from the title, this is a novel of different sort than Benchley's others.

A brief description of the plot: a native girl, Paloma, living on an island in the Sea of Cortez spends much of her time snorkel diving off a seamount near her village. She is the only person who knows of the seamount's location. It was shown to her by her now deceased father, who was an outsider on the island. From her father she learned an attitude of respect for the sea; she learned to enjoy the sea, but also to harbor what is essentially a conservationist viewpoint. Others on the island, including her fisherman brother, see the sea as an adversary, from which sustenance must be taken. They live on the water, but not in the water. Naturally, her brother eventually discovers the seamount, along with the sea-life that is abundant there and wants to fish the area, creating a confrontation with Paloma.

The novel is a serious and admirable departure from Benchley's earlier work. I understand that Benchley felt a certain amount of guilt for the rest of his life after writing Jaws, because of the fear that novel created toward sharks. It seems he is trying to make up for some of that here. Unfortunately, I don't think you can really call Girl a success. Though not as sensational as his earlier novels, Girl still suffers from characters that are poorly drawn, only now there is not even plot to drive the story forward. Instead we have a very slow read without much in the way of an emotional payoff. There is also some magical realist type of writing going on at the climax that does not seem to fit with one of the novel's major themes, namely that animals need to be respected but not anthropomorphized. It is difficult to reconcile the conclusion with the bulk of the novel; it is almost a direct contradiction.

At any rate, I do give Benchley credit for leaving behind the formula that he used to create an enormous bestseller. No doubt his publisher had doubts about this book. My suspicion is that Girl probably did not sell all that well and that is one reason why Benchley found himself returning to the "monsters of the sea" prescription in some of his later books. A for effort, C- for execution in The Girl of the Sea of Cortez.