Will Kostakis, We Could Be Something, Allen and Unwin, May 2023, 416 pp., RRP $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781761180170
Will Kostakis’s latest YA novel is a highly readable but complex and moving book, following the lives of two teenage boys whose lives ultimately intersect in Sydney.
The story is told in the first-person alternating between Harvey’s story and that of Sotiris. Harvey is the son of two gay men and, when they split up, Harvey moves from Perth to Sydney where he has to fit into his Greek family, whom he hardly knows. There are all sorts of adjustments Harvey must make. He leaves school (something about which he is not unhappy); he must get a job; adjust to life above a café; adjust to life with this new, very different family.
Harvey grieves over his parents’ break up and, when the father whom he calls Dad arrives unexpectedly from Perth, Harvey hopes they might get back together again, something he tries to facilitate. His attempts are moving, and the reader feels both the earnestness of his actions and his disappointment, although he comes to understand the inevitability of a final break up. As with previous books, Kostakis’s characters are also strongly drawn. All of them are multi-layered and very real. The interconnectedness of the main characters is one of the intriguing aspects of the book.
Different kinds of family are thus portrayed in this book from a Greek family with a strong matriarch, a Greek family that includes a great-grandmother to the family of two fathers and a teenage son. They all have their ups and downs, their difficult interactions, and their love. Each has a sorrow and, as Tolstoy wrote: “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina).
Kostakis evokes a strong sense of place. Sydney’s Darlinghurst area is bustling and diverse. Perth, on the other hand, is portrayed as quieter and perhaps more sedate. These differences have an effect on Harvey himself as he adjusts to his new life.
This is a complex book exploring multiple themes. In addition to the exploration of what makes a family, there is love, friendship, sexuality and illness and its effects on those around as well as the sufferer.
It is a book about coming out and coming of age. It is also a bildungsroman of sorts as we watch both Sotiris and Harvey struggle. Sotiris with his writing career and his identity as an author, both as a young man and as he is older, and Harvey as he undergoes a journey of conflict, growth and development and the promise of fulfilment.
Reviewed by Margot Hillel
