Over For Rockwell. Uzodinma Okehi. Hobart. 2015. 344 pp. $12.
It’s always been for me a search for the authentic, the different and the real. That is what leads me to this gem, a real dreamer’s notebook: Over For Rockwell, by Uzodinma Okehi. This deliberately pint-sized book, a collection of prose short stories, packs plenty of punch with Blue Okoye leading the way, a protagonist feverishly seeking the euphoric stuff of life.
Art by Uzodinma Okehi.
Perhaps Blue Okoye is an alter ego for the author. Very good chance of that–or at least a jumping off point in the tradition of, well, just about every audacious and ambitious young writer out to suck the very marrow of existence. Our story has much to do with a young man pitted against, and madly in love with, the big city. Which big city? Well, New York City, of course, is front and center but also the BIG CITY in general and that leads to adventures overseas, particularly Hong Kong. Our hero is up to his eyeballs in frenzied lust for life: out to create great art and bed every beautiful woman he can charm. Yes, all the hot and classic stuff, before some people lost their nerve to go all-out Hemingway. This is a collection of loosely connected observations, some twenty years ago, and then going even further back, but it all rings true and has a timeless quality to it. In fact, the narrative is structured in such a way that has Blue Okoye on his excellent adventures spiraling through time. We begin circa 1995, jump around to 2003 and beyond, and land back in 1995. All to show that the shaggy dog stories from our salad days share much in common, transcend the boundaries of time.
The novel is very clever and fun to read, even if it doesn’t have much in the way of a plot, at least not in the traditional sense. Okehi defies convention at every turn, delivering a series of observations that resemble a story but doesn’t adhere to any rules. This main character appears to be perpetually on the make, dreaming big dreams, and colliding with the reality that he will likely never be a so-called “success.” At times, a lot actually, Okehi questions the goals we’ve been told we must achieve: the soul-crushing game of gaining notoriety. Was it ever in the cards for our hero, Blue Okoye? Success is a very hard thing to pin down, especially if you keep feeling the need to roam the streets at night in search of some elusive epiphany, notebook in hand, ready to jot down inspiration as it beams down upon you. So, yeah, Okehi has fun with the starving artist tropes for all they’re worth. No matter how hard you try to pry it from him, your dim-witted co-worker at the warehouse is probably not going to blurt out some piece of inadvertent wisdom that you, as the artist, can mine for gold.
One of the really interesting things going on in this very quirky novel is the send-up of the indie comics community. Blue Okoye is supposed to be an aspiring comics artist although there is very little to indicate why he is pursuing this line of creative work and what he hopes to achieve. And perhaps that is the whole point. Blue Okoye is simply performing a role. He plucked out a purpose in life from all the cool and hip options before him and he’s sticking to it. Okehi doesn’t only depict Okoye as shallow but all the other comics artists he knows seem to be treading water as well. Ah, the folly of youth. Will Blue Okoye mature in time and find some real meaning to life? Well, that’s for another novel. This novel is all about floundering and, on that subject, it succeeds with flying colors.
Also available from the same author is House of Hunger, a continuation of the Blue Okoye adventures. I think, if you’re new to this, it will be a lot of fun to dive into either work and let it take over. After taking a look at both, I appreciate the indie connection more as Okehi is basically treating all these prose short stories as content to publish in the small press community and/or as short works in a zine format to be sold at small venues, especially various zine and indie comics festivals, to perhaps be later collected into a book. And, of course, the overriding theme of these stories invariably is about this indie/small press community. Works for me.
