Short Flight/Long Drive Books
October 2015

REVIEW BY CASSANDRA A. BAIM

Uzodinma Okehi’s debut novel Over For Rockwell, in one simple sentence, is about a young artist looking to find his place in the world. In 332 pages, divided into vignettes, narrator Blue Okoye jumps between his time in living in Hong Kong and New York in a gust of post-modern stream of consciousness narration. As he chases his artistic dream, he falls in love and lust with different women, draws comics, writes stories, works in a bookstore, and furiously tries to make it as an artist while figuring out what it means to do just that. The structure doesn’t take a standard form; there is no beginning, middle, and end in the way that we’re used to. Instead, each vignette tells a separate story. Each one is a snippet of this artist’s life—trying to talk to women at a SoHo club, growing up in the suburbs in the late 80s and befriending two Indian students in his class, or trying to order noodles from a pretty girl in Hong Kong. Though seemingly disjointed, the vignettes tie together to express a larger theme: the effect of the passage of time on an artist.

The beginning of the eponymous vignette sums up his struggle: “The sad fact was the sheer amount of time I must have spent waiting, praying, paddling upstream—my faith in the concept of inspiration that almost always proved out to be fruitless. This search had become my exciting real life while the pathetic few hours each night I forced myself to draw in turn became the farce, the myth, destroyed by experience.”

The novel’s antagonist doesn’t take a physical form. Instead, it takes the shape of many things, one being Hong Kong and New York City. Each place is its own character, and Blue interacts with the pavement and buildings as much as he does with the people in it. He “feel[s] the city breathe.” His greatest obstacles are his constant creative battles.  He has to negotiate his own aspirations with those of everyone else vying for the same idea.  He asks himself over and over again why he wants to draw, and if it’s worth it. “My problem was that I was as average as the rest, and yet I underestimated that even the average man has his stupendous dreams, a fact which often jumped right up to sting me in the face.” Blue’s internal battles reflect what we all feel as artists and writers—when will I catch that big break? Is what I’m doing enough? Does this even matter? But Over For Rockwell isn’t just about the life of a fledgling artist—it’s about the life of a fledgling person. Okehi asks the questions that artists and writers ask themselves with the same existentialist attitude of any other person asking themselves what their purpose is.

Okehi got his start working on zines, so it is no surprise he writes with a post-modern gritty realism reminiscent of Charles Bukowski or even contemporary writers like Tao Lin. The writing is so personal, humble, and self-effacing that I suspect much of it is autobiographical. As writers we’re taught to “write what we know,” and it is clear that Okehi has lived through the same self-doubt that Blue faces. This is a necessary read for any aspiring artist or writer, or anyone looking for a new, informed voice.