Indecent Proposal
by Jack Engelhard
12.95, Cover: Paperback, ISBN: 0-9674074-1-9, ©2001

REVIEWS

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW -- "The struggle between these two embraces a number of primal issues: the Jew versus significant-non-Jews, materialism versus spirituality, Israel versus the Arab countries, the past versus the future, and the religious world versus the secular one. Is this book fun to read? You betcha. Engelhard had a good idea."

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- The prose is cool and muscular…in all, the fine tension between desire and high moral principle make Indecent Proposal a fast and well crafterd book"

DENVER JEWISH NEWS -- The publisher that is reissuing Jack Engelhard's 1989 best-selling novel Indecent Proposal has added a subtitle – "The Original Novel" – apparently to distinguish the book from its very popular offspring, the 1993 movie starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson.

There are several reasons for that, including what Engelhard himself rather darkly admits in a new introduction might have been an attempt by Hollywood to "suppress" the original novel. This alleged suppression may well have had to do with the cinematic treatment of the novelist's idea, namely the total removal of a strong ethno-religious theme – Jew vs. Arab/Muslim – which was significant in Engelhard's original.

That theme is, in fact, an important dimension of the novel, but not nearly so much as it might seem at first glance, alleged Hollywood political correctness notwithstanding. The fact is that Indecent Proposal works effectively on several levels, race and religion being only one of them. At its core, the novel explores other timeless human conflicts – spirituality vs. lust, love vs. greed, good vs. evil – all handled with Engelhard's trademark sparse but warm, irreverent yet often profound prose.

By now, probably thanks to the movie, the premise of the story itself is fairly well known: Joshua, the Jewish protagonist, lives on a middle class writer's income and greatly resents it; Joan, his non-Jewish wife, comes from a wealthy waspish family but gladly sacrifices material comfort for marital bliss; Ibrahaim, a zillionaire sheik and playboy from an oil-rich Arab country has been driven to distraction and worse by his wealth-fueled boredom.

The three characters have their date with fate at an Atlantic City casino, frequented by Joshua who never loses hope that one big jackpot will erase his financial struggles. Ibrahaim, first seen distractedly betting millions on blackjack, is blunt and to the point. He offers Joshua and Joan a cool million dollars for the privilege of spending one night with Joan, with everything that entails.

On the surface, it's a remarkably simple set-up, but Engelhard realizes the multitude of facets woven into its fabric. Its ramifications are both obvious and hidden, simple and complex. Is it wrong to even consider such an idea, much less to act on it? Would G-d punish them directly for such a transgression, or would their own guilt be their worst persecutor? Could a couple's love possibly survive such a cynical encounter? Yet, can Joshua and Joan even afford to refuse Ibrahim's profane offer, not just because of their financial need but because of the cancerous regret they fear will always haunt them if they turn him down?

Indecent Proposal is loaded with fascinating metaphors for those in search of them. Ibrahim, jaded and solitary, is the Biblical serpent of temptation, while Joan serves as the pliable Eve and Joshua the quickly-tempted Adam. Or this: Ibrahim, wealthy, idle and spiteful, represents the ruling elite of the Arab world; Joshua, the divided modern Jew aspiring to spiritual goodness but obsessed with money and assimilation; Joan, the beautiful, comfortable, Protestant American, subject of both men’s (peoples’?) competing attentions and desires.

Engelhard juggles these ideas skillfully -- somehow expressing them through prose that is lean and visual in a book of less than 300 pages -- but they seem to work best when seen through straightforward, not symbolic, lenses. In terms of gripping personal drama, the cataclysmic collision between these three characters is more than sufficient to carry the story. Readers will grow fascinated as they watch their movements, anticipating the pain and disaster toward which they are invariably headed, and find themselves unable to turn away as events unfold. For there is to this story, for all the moral, philosophical and practical debate that arcs between its characters, a looming inevitability, almost as if Engelhard – like his character Ibrahim – understands well indeed the pitiful frailties of the human heart.

Yet, when all is said and done, there are surprises in store, for readers and characters alike, and not all of them are bad. They bring to effective conclusion a story that is already effective, not to mention fascinating, illuminating and deeply troubling.


Review from the novel "Three In Love: Menages A Trois From Ancient To Modern Times"
by Barbara and Michael Foster (1997, HarperCollins)

Chapter Three: The Myth of Menage
In the beginning there were three: Adam, Eve and the Serpent.
In the denouement Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise and find a tough new world. He must work for a living, she gets pregnant and gives birth in pain, and the Serpent has to crawl on his belly in the dust. This is not a happy ending and won't do for our movie. Wouldn't it be nicer if Adam and Eve, all forgiven, move to California, start over, and build a nice house on the beach in Santa Monica? The Serpent uses his salesmanship to take over companies. Don't laugh; that's how the movie Indecent Proposal goes. This early nineties adaptation of the Eden myth grossed over $200 million worldwide and was the subject of intense controversy.

Indecent Proposal is the Californicated version of Jack Engelhard's novel of the same name, which was a hard-hitting cautionary tale set in unglamorous Atlantic City. Engelhard rather likes the movie, which he says retains the three essential factors of his novel: temptation, recrimination, and forgiveness. While it's amusing to think of Robert Redford playing the Serpent, the tempting fruit of our time is not knowledge, even carnal, but wealth. The selling of Demi Moore for a million dollars by husband Woody Harrelson may have been denounced by feminists, but a survey taken by Oprah, who did an entire show on the film, found that over half the women in her audience would sell themselves for a high enough price.

Engelhard's novel, written with the sparseness of Hemingway but the moral intensity of I. B. Singer, was overlooked until the movie hit. Philosophical in a street-smart way, it encompasses themes from the whole of Genesis. The male protagonist, Joshua Kane, is unassuming but a parttime Israeli commando. He lives in Philadelphia with his beautiful blond wife, Joan, who has left her wealthy mainline connections to share Joshua's meager life. Haunted by his parents' poverty (they were expelled from France by the Nazis), Josh takes Joan to the casinos of Atlantic City, hoping to get rich. Instead, they meet Ibrahim, the billionaire ruler of an oilrich kingdom. A prince of the desert dressed in black, he is a more ruthless serpent than Redford’s businessman, and he adds the polarity (and attraction) of Arab versus Jew to the class distinctions that separate (and unite) Josh and his shiksa.

Ibrahim, who boasts he can buy people, makes the infamous proposal to Josh and Joan. She, like her screen counterpart, accepts. The screenwriter, Amy Holden Jones, grasped one basis of menage when she defended her concept: "Demi Moore is given a chance to commit adultery with a very attractive man, and yet she can tell herself that she is doing it for her husband. That's every woman's fantasy." Jones supposes that unlike men, women must overcome a barrier of guilt in order to take what they want.

The novel's action is more three-way than Jones's script allows. Josh realizes that Ibrahim "wanted me, my capitulation as much as he wanted Joan." Josh resists the deal, but Ibrahim plays on Joan's "forbidden yearnings and fantasies." Also on Josh's, who declares him "more than a man…a force that controlled lives." Both he and Joan get into the immorality of it. Josh, on the night of the deal, though drugged, wakes up in his hotel room to the realization that Joan and Ibrahim had "made love in my bed as I slumbered." He can still smell them. Afterward, Joan had removed his street clothes, and the pair had tucked him in before departing to continue their games in Ibrahim's suite.

This night isn't the end of their entanglement. Jew and Arab, the men are brothers (as were Cain and Abel) even when murderously jealous. The Gentile woman is between them, but neither can wholly have her. The outcome will be a rupture of the fragile tolerance that unites the three—a descent into the bloody triangle.

Although Joshua Kane searches for a precedent for the deal he has made, he can't find one. Yet there are indecent proposals in the Bible. Abraham, on journeying into Egypt, asked his young, beautiful wife, Sarah, to deny they were married and say she was his sister (she was his half sister). Pharaoh took her as a concubine and exceeded Abraham's expectations by loading him with "sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses and camels"—the equivalent of a million dollars.

When affliction struck the court, Pharaoh angrily sent away Sarah and Abraham, but they kept their ill-gotten gains. Abraham was rich in "cattle, silver, and gold," thanks to having rented out his wife. In the present controversy under way over Genesis, amid the attacks on and apologies for what is a mythical narrative, Rabbi Burton Visotzky has at least made clear that Abraham is "a pimp." This seems the main source of the patriarch's wealth. After leaving Egypt, Abraham again claimed Sarah was his sister and sold her to Abimelich, king of Gerar, who dreamed that Sarah was Abraham's wife and then confronted him. Abraham explained to the king that he feared for his life, then made the remarkable confession that he'd told Sarah, "At every place whither we shall come, say of me: he is my brother." A man who makes a habit of selling his wife is indeed a pimp. But what does this make Sarah?