Dance Prone

Author(s): David Coventry

Novel | Read our reviews! | Aotearoa Fiction

During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band's four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, and violence.
With decades passed and compelled by his wife's failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.


Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. Set simultaneously during the post-punk period and the narrative present of 2019, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
Remember those gigs when your body was a sledgehammer slamming itself any which way and your aural senses were overwhelmed in the best hedonistic way, where the dance floor was small and cramped, where sometimes you ducked a fist and danced on. The opening lines of David Coventry’s new novel, Dance Prone, gives us the viewpoint of Con, the lead singer of a post-punk band in mid-80s America, watching the chaos unfold. Con is up for it, pushing to the edge of control, looking for perfection in chaos with his band, Neues Bauen. Yet like Coventry's first novel, The Invisible Mile, the setting isn’t exactly the theme. His brilliant debut took out the best first book at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2016, picked up for international publication and translated into numerous languages. Dance Prone looks set for a similar trajectory if the writing is anything to go by. This is the best New Zealand book I have read in a long time, and one of the most affecting novels about trauma, memory and its fallout, where language, pace and tension are expertly pitched and the chaotic music scene notches the decibels up to a level to absorb you in this world. Though it’s not all high intensity. The reflective passages, descriptions of people and place keep us anchored, and the dark humour keeps us amused, even when the psychological aspects of Con’s story threaten to flood our senses. We meet Con over several distinct periods in his life (between the 80s when he is a young man and 2020 when he is in his early 50s) as he intersects with his past band-mates and re-engages, or attempts to re-engage, with pivotal incidents. Not far in, we are beset by a shocking incident. It is wholly unexpected to the reader as it is to Con. Suddenly violence is very near and very real. This incident sets off a trigger of actions and inactions from Con and a crazy reaction from Tone, his kiwi bandmate. As Tone recovers in the hospital and the band tours the dives and front lounges of fans, Con finds himself split in two — before and after — and bereft of explanation and knowledge. Here we start to dig into the themes of denial and memory, or the erasure of fact. In the desert, appropriately, at an indie music gig complete with existential philosophy, this all comes to a head. As the story moves back and forth in time, the action and telling unfold alongside Con’s awareness. As he hides from the truth, the truth is hidden from the reader. What happens in Phoenix is only revealed by a scratchy video of the band’s last gig seen by Con in Marrakech in 2019, where he is searching for Tone, now living in the remote mountains with a group of artist-activists. Add to this a sweet romance, some great riffs on bands, the indie scene and philosophical rants, seemingly senseless behaviour and cravings for artistic perfection, and you have a deft and nuanced novel. And Coventry can write. Each sentence places you where you want to be, each conversation adds another dimension and the plot unfolds with a tension that keeps the bowstring taut and rewards with the aim of the arrow. Intelligent, intimate and raw, Dance Prone is stunning.


REVIEW: What a brute fucken show, man. David Coventry’s new novel is a gorgeous panegyric to the purity, poison and impossibly high stakes of punk. A young band of fleeting genius tours the living rooms and crappy bars of mid 80s US before imploding in violence and horror. Dance Prone captures that thing about beautiful doomed brilliance sanctified by its miniature life expectancy. It’s funny, filthy, erudite, and rude, like LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’ as retold by the mid-period DeLillo of The Names and Mao II.’ —Carl Shuker, author of A Mistake
‘A feverish phantasmagoria of intrigue, Dance Prone is a high-tension wire headrush of punk rock, romance and displacement. It bristles with atmosphere and brutal energy.’ —Kiran Dass


 

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Praise for David Coventry’s first novel, The Invisible Mile:‘Bruising, beautiful and ultimately transcendent, there’s a perfect thought on sport, humanity or endurance on just about every page.’ —Markus Zusak ‘A truly extraordinary first novel.’ —Nicholas Reid ‘I think everyone should read this book . . . I’m just overwhelmed by it.’ —Ruth Todd David Coventry is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Invisible Mile (VUP, 2015).

David Coventry was born in 1969 and lives in Wellington with his wife, the novelist Laura Southgate. Published in over fifteen countries, Coventry’s debut, The Invisible Mile, was described as ‘one of the most gruelling novels about sport ever written’, one which ‘immediately places David Coventry among the elite of New Zealand authors’, and won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He received his MA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington where he is currently working on a PhD.

General Fields

  • : 9781776563098
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : UNKNOWN
  • : July 2020
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : David Coventry
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 823.3
  • : 392