Books like Indecent Proposal

20 years after I watched the movie by the same title, I finally read the original novel "Indecent Proposal". Then, in 1993, for me the movie's main question reduced itself to: Why would any woman go back to Woody Harrelson when she can have Robert Redford? In fact, I thought that Woody Harrelson portrayed an unattractive person in comparison to Robert Redford, which made the question even more natural. Now having read the book, I think Harrelson's performance may have been the finest of all three.I read 'Indecent Proposal' because after having read three other novels penned by Jack Engelhard, I realized that the 1993 movie's plot could not have been all. Something was missing. Engelhard writes much deeper content than the movie's story-line. Yes, I had known for a long time that the two men are really an Arab prince and a Jewish man, who escaped Hitler's Germany as child, but there had to be more, which Hollywood just simply cut.For starters, there is the fact that both, Joan and Joshua, have been married before, that they have divorced their previous spouses to be with each other. While the movie made me believe that maybe Diana/Joan chose David/Joshua in some youthful excitement, and that she could have advanced to love another more mature man, in the novel that event had already happened, and she had chosen Joshua. That opens a whole new dimension, because what Joan had done before, namely leave her first husband, she could do again and leave Joshua; or it could be the other way around: Joan would never leave Joshua because she really knew for sure that Joshua was:"... the outsider. The underdog. The fighter. The loner. The wanderer. You're everything I've been looking for." ... and that "other men were shallow".Even more important and not surprising to me, Hollywood cut the book's deciding element about "the movie", the movie Ibrahim took of his sexual encounter with Joan. Obviously, Hollywood understands the power of the visual image better than anybody else, Hollywood creates the images, which sway our feelings toward this or that. A visual document/proof never goes away, which is exactly why Hollywood never wants to point to how powerful the movie industry is in influencing people's minds.In his novel Engelhard refers occasionally to the Holocaust Joshua escaped as a child with his parents. It is because of the pictures that Amercian soldiers took when entering the concentration camps that we will never forget the Holocaust, whereas other undocumented atrocities in earlier history have become this blob, which we cannot associate any feelings with. Pictures document feelings and create feelings.Joan does not know that her feelings, while having sex with Ibrahim have been recorded, but Ibrahim tells Joshua, and Joshua even gets to see part of the movie. Joshua mentions the recording of the movie to Joan but claims later that there is no movie and that he just said so. Uncertainty about possible documentation is even worse and Joan has to live through it. Both, Joan and Joshua cannot pretend that this sexual episode was just "something/nothing", because once they know or even only suspect that visual documentation recorded its reality it can't be just forgotten. In life, "documented reality" changes everything for real people (excluding politicians like John Edwards).In his novel, Engelhard puts his finger on what influences too many of us to do things, which we don't really believe but only hope for:"People are vulnerable, Josh, and I'll tell you why. They're vulnerable, because everybody wants something better. You hear that? Everybody wants something better out of life. Nobody, nobody is happy with what he's got. That's why we prosper here in this business . We cater to that, to that weakness, to that weakness in everybody--even the Ibrahims of the world."However, when late in the novel Joshua thinks:"As I made my way over I remembered this from the Midrash: A man's feet lead him to his destiny."he is giving us hope that with our thinking we can direct our feet to walk to the destiny we choose."Indecent Proposal" is a fabulous read to encourage the intelligent and entertaining pondering about where we want to go and which paths to choose. Highly recommend to all over the age of 18. And, yes, the sex scene is very steamy.Gisela Hausmann, author & blogger