“I can’t remember the first time I read Jaws; probably in high school,” [LaValle] said. “Certainly I’d seen the film long before. I picked up the book when I saw it in the library, and I was shocked to see all the stuff about the marriage. It’s so much about adultery; it’s astounding. And it makes so little sense in the context of a thriller about a shark. I feel like those sections are the really personal stuff; I feel like those are the things that Benchley couldn’t cut out. It never left me, the fact that you could have those two things in there.” (via Victor LaValle discusses returning his fiction to Queens and to the question of manhood | Capital New York)