Book review: Kokomo by Victoria Hannan

ARC courtesy Hachette Australia – release date 28 July 2020.

We are a people who exist uneasily between expectation and consequence.

In our heady younger days particularly, but even as we get older, especially if we are optimistically inclined, we can’t help but approach a given situation with the fixed idea that it will go one way or another.

Logic or past experience might suggest we are foolish, but hope springs eternal and all that, and so, all evidence to the contrary, we plow on, hoping and praying and dreaming and wishing for the very best of outcomes.

Alas, life more often than not fails to reward that irrational faith and so we find ourselves at the same place as Mina Gordon in Victoria Hannan’s richly poignant debut novel, Kokomo, alone and bereft and wondering how all that sparkling promise, professionally and romantically, came to nothing.

Or what feels like nothing, at least.

The reality is that life pretty much guarantees a yawning chasm between expectation and result because our ability to influence people and events is next to nothing, and so while we might be consummately accomplished and as talented as they come, all of that matters little in the grand and uncontrollable scheme of things.

“‘For fuck’s sake, Mum,’ Mina snapped, and Elaine froze.

‘Jasmina, language,’ she said sharply.

‘You haven’t seen me in seven years. Seven years. Your only daughter Your only family. And all you want to do while I’m here is watch TV.’ Mina was surprised to find she was yelling. She hadn’t meant to.”
(P. 96)

It’s a tough lesson to learn, and as Mina flies back hurriedly to Melbourne on the news that her agoraphobic mother of 12 years standing has finally left the house, which could mean all manner of things or nothing at all, she has to confront the fact that life, for all the years she has lived on Earth, remains stubbornly and frustratingly unknowable in so many ways.

Especially when Mina’s mother Elaine refuses to discuss why she left the house, or in fact, if she even left it all, or why she closed the doors up tight to the outside world in the first place.

Theirs has always been an uneasy relationship, one marked by a profound need to belong that has never found a sense of resolution for either mother or daughter, the connection less an actuality than an expectation that, as mother and daughter, they should be bonded in close and fundamental ways.

The sad truth is that they aren’t, with Elaine perplexed that her daughter has returned from her life in London almost as abruptly as she left to establish it seven years earlier, and Mina unable to understand why her mother won’t open up about the trauma that sent her into a lockdown that has ended as unexpectedly as it began.

Hannan deftly and with great sensitivity and insight explores the great cavernous gap that exists between what we want and what we get, whether its familial closeness, romantic longing or professional achievement, all issues that comes to haunt Mina on her return to a place that both feels like home, and often nothing like it anymore.

Much of the emotional power of Kokomo comes from the fact that Mina has never really felt at home in her own family, even before her geographic distancing.

While she felt a deep and abiding sense of belonging and closeness to her father growing up, that same sense of intimacy was never a hallmark of her relationship with Elaine, who for long-held secretive reasons that Hannan explores with breathtaking beauty and emotional nuance, kept herself walled off from her family and even close friends, long before it found physical manifestation in her agoraphobic existence.

Thus, while she and Mina were technically members of the same family, the younger Gordon found herself far more at home across the street in the Cheng family’s rambunctiously and warmly chaotic family, presided over by the garrulous Valerie, than she ever did with Elaine and Bill.

Years later, in the wake of family tragedy and a less-then-perfect series of developments in her personal and professional life in London, Mina is forced to confront why she is back and why it means so much to re-connected with a mother you could well argue she never really connected with in the first place.

Kokomo does an affectingly exemplary job of examining how long-practised dynamics of a family find their roots in secrets held close to the chest, secrets that might feel exciting and thrilling at first, and certainly in the section of the novel that examines events from Elaine’s point-of-view that’s exactly what they are but how, left to fester and rot in the shadow of non-fulfillment, they can corrode and destroy the very things a person’s claims to value the most.

“‘You did always seem like you had everything figured out,’ Mina agreed.

‘So did you,’ he said.

She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘And look at us now.’ Mina started laughing, and once she’d started, couldn’t stop. Brendan laughed too. They lay there for several minutes, racked with it, gasping for air, until at last, it subsided. Mina wiped a tear from her cheek.” (p. 152)

Kokomo also takes a deep dive into the way we define ourselves in terms of those we know and how in seeking to work out who we are and how we have changed, and what went wrong along the way, we are forced to confront how we are often complicit in our own misfortune and life is rarely as starry-eyed and forgiving of our foibles and flaws as we would like it to be.

Certainly Hannan doesn’t wave some magic wand and make everything perfect as Mina and Elaine begin the slow and excruciatingly back-and-forth, stop-start of actually getting to know one another, which while it might have been tidy and neat and ripe for a feel-good happy ending, isn’t reflective of real life.

What Kokomo delivers, with quite a few laughs and with richly rewarding relationships as prevalent as those that are not – Mina and Valerie’s daughter Kira remain the closest of best friends while Valerie is the warm and loving mother Mina never really thought she had – is life as it is in all its flawed glory, replete with mistaken perceptions, hidden lives turned toxic, secrets left to long to decay, fractured senses of belonging and notions of family and connection that exist less as an actual things than as assumed notions of how things should be.

Full to meaningfully bursting with exquisitely well-realised characters, a willingness to be honest about the good and bad things of life, sparkling humour and confronting rumination and hard truths finally told, Kokomo is a brilliant piece of quietly-emotive storytelling that grabs your heart less because it offers neatly squared away answers and sitcom-ready homilies but because it is real and honest about this thing we call life and how it may not always be possible to bridge the yawning gap between what we expect and what we get.

But for all its honesty about what may not be possible, Kokomo also holds out the real hope, one expressed with grounded truthfulness rather than treacly wish fulfillment, that you can repair what has been broken, connect what was never joined together and find some peace and belonging in ways that might, as it turns out, be even better than you imagined (though even that isn’t guaranteed to come without some pain but then would it be life if it didn’t?).

Kokomo also takes a deep dive into the way we define ourselves in terms of those we know and how in seeking to work out who we are and how we have changed, and what went wrong along the way, we are forced to confront how we are often complicit in our own misfortune and life is rarely as starry-eyed and forgiving of our foibles and flaws as we would like it to be.

Certainly Hannan doesn’t wave some wand and make everything perfect as Mina and Elaine begin the slow and excruciatingly back-and-forth, stop-start of actually getting to know one another, which while it might have been tidy and neat and ripe for a feel-good happy ending, isn’t reflective of real life.

What Kokomo delivers, with quite a few laughs and richly rewarding relationships as prevalent as those that are not – Mina and Valerie’s daughter Kira remain the closest of best friends while Valerie is the warm and loving mother Mina never really thought she had – is life as it is in all its flawed glory, replete with mistaken perceptions, hidden lives turned toxic, secrets left to long to decay, fractured senses of belonging and notions of family and connection that exist less as an actual things than as assumed notions of how things should be.

Full to meaningfully bursting with exquisitely well-realised characters, a willingness to be honest about the good and bad things of life, sparkling humour and confronting rumination and hard truths finally told, Kokomo is a brilliant piece of quietly-emotive storytelling that grabs your heart less because it offers neatly squared away answers and sitcom-ready homilies, but because it is real and honest about this thing we call life and how it may not always be possible to bridge the yawning gap between what we want and what we get.

But for all its honesty about what may not be possible, Kokomo also holds out the real hope, one expressed with grounded truthfulness rather than treacly wish fulfillment, that you can repair what has been broken, connect what was never joined together and find some peace and belonging in ways that might, as it turns out, be even better than you imagined (though even that isn’t guaranteed to come without some pain but then would it be life if it didn’t, right?).