A Passing Shower —A Review

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One Grain Amongst the Storm

bg_pass_shower_imgMy student life ended abruptly, or shall I say, comic-apocalyptically, with the postmodernist classic by Joseph Heller, Catch-22. It happened when I wrote a chapter for my doctoral thesis that would soon be abandoned, on the anti-war anti-novel with an anti-hero gripped by existential absurdism. What I posited in the chapter was Joseph Heller had transmuted a rather mammoth graphic comic into pages of plain text with a devastating effect. Rarely before, the human brinkmanship manifest in the madness of war, bureaucratic idiocy and capitalist avarice was dissected with scalpels of black humour and rank irreverence at such epic lengths. The Catch-22 was a war-cry to end all wars in favour of reason and rationality fabricated by the society, no matter which club the critics sought to include the book in —absurdist, comic-apocalyptic, existentialist, black humour or counter-cultural zeitgeist.

I was dumped by the professor supervising my PhD…

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18 thoughts on “A Passing Shower —A Review”

  4. willowwrites

    I wanted you to know that I have started reading your book and am on page 53…I simply LOVE it!!
    My only dissatisfaction is that I wish it was a hard copy and not online. I want to continue reading but have to shut down the computer for the day.
    The characters are wonderfully developed and realistic, the story is woven together nicely, it reads smoothly and I don’t want to put it down.
    I find myself cheering for Yvonne, loving Cob, and not loving most of the other siblings so much…too much like my own, I think 🙂
    Mattie would have been a gem to have known and Tom…well, he’s a stand up guy and excellent Granpop. Wait…oh, my, I forgot, this is fiction.
    Can’t wait to read more

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      1. willowwrites

        Well, I finished your book and enjoyed it tremendously.
        Fantastic job!
        Have you self-published? or is it in print via a publishing house?
        Can I purchase a hard copy somewhere yet?
        I’m not a fan of online reading…yours was the first book I read that way. I prefer to feel the pages 🙂

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        1. Bruce Goodman Post author

          Thank you for such a lovely comment, and for reading the book online.
          I’m a bit like you, and I like to have a book in my hand, although I have read a few online. Unfortunately the novel is not published in hardcopy or even digitally with Amazon or whatever. Everything costs money and I don’t actually have any – being a jobless pensioner with no life savings!!! I initially wrote the novel wrongfully “thinking” that I could make a little cash out of it – but it was a naïve thought!
          Thanks again for your comment and for enjoying the novel!

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          1. willowwrites

            Well that is just wrong!
            Get rid of the woman, sell the Lamborghini and publish the book…thar’s gold in them thar pages. Then you can buy back all the cows and the land too 🙂

            Seriously, I would be very interested in showing your manuscript around if you are interested. I’m not good at promoting my stuff (as I’m not sure it’s that good) but I’m fantastic at selling others stuff. I really did like the book.
            May I email you about this?

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      1. exiledprospero

        Knowledge is inconsequential; madness, though, is that rare quality which actually matters–but is wholly destructive ( as we live in a deeply ironic universe ). Your stories are replete with madness, Bruce. Paraphrasing George W. Bush: Bring them on!

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        1. Bruce Goodman Post author

          Thank you Prospero in exile! It used to worry me – being mad. But now I realize that madness is merely a notch (or two) above normal. Among the blogs I follow are a couple of mad bloggers (including yourself) – sort of like Hamlet who can (pretend to) be mad and say things the way they are – or as Uma says in his review of my novel (I like to write one once every 67 years or so) Shakespeare’s clowns serve a similar function. Your paraphrase of George W. Bush was both succinct and… succinct.

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