Dance Prone
Profound… Pitch-perfect and nuanced. As Dance Prone proves, Coventry’s work is some of the finest in recent New Zealand literature. His explorations of music and art are remarkable. His characters live and resound. The American Midwest, the city square of Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech, and the coast near Red Rocks in Wellington are all landscapes evoked with clarity…. Extraordinary and remarkable. DAVID HERKT, NZ HERALD
Dance Prone is a proclamation of Coventry’s literary powers, a transcendental quest through the mind, body and through landscape, and a raw and raging celebration of music. You don’t just read a David Coventry novel, you experience it with every facet of your being. Every page is alive. He writes like no one else. This book is astounding. MEGAN BRADBURY, AUTHOR OF EVERYONE IS WATCHING
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 early 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
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…. Intelligent, intimate and raw, Dance Prone is stunning. STELLA CHRYSOSTOMOU, VOLUME
This book is many things. A giddy rush of indie excess, punk mayhem, outsider art, blurred memory, lapsed existence and sudden grace. A mind-bending trip that plays out in that liminal space between innocence and insanity; drift and purpose; rational and rogue; anarchy and calm; between what was lost and what may endure. Cut with a cast of characters sawn through the bone, language that giddies-up the heart, and always, always, alive with a throbbing pulse that insists you read on. Lyrical. Violent. Elegiac. Epic. I adore David Coventry’s writing and Dance Prone is a magnificent novel. ALAN MCMONAGLE, AUTHOR OF ITHACA & LAURA CASSIDY’S WALK OF FAME
Taut and intelligent, this story of music, trauma and artistic ambition has all the precision, spookiness and elegance of the best post-rock. MATT THORNE, AUTHOR OF 8 MINUTES IDLE & PRINCE
The blood, desire, pain and loss – as well as Conrad’s eventual contentment – all of it feels true, because of the novel’s volatile physicality, and the unshrinking vulnerability of its narrator. More than anything I’ve read in ages, Dance Prone feels real. ANNALEESE JOCHEMS, NEWSROOM
[Dance Prone] is about the unreliability of memory, the fact that history and explanations are all invented narrative: “The oldest form of violence.” Coventry is a master at making the reader see significance, make their own narratives. The novel is meticulous, all mysteries are solved, all things explained. But the reader is still left with the uncertainty of history and sadness of damaged lives. Dance Prone is just superb – read it. ALYSON E. BAKER, ALYSONTHEBLOG
Dance Prone is a novel that interrogates music and it’s capacity for producing societal change, the bonds of friendship and family, and the manner in which we avoid confronting ourselves with the truth. …. I had a sense that if I could unlock one sentence, then I might discover the meaning of the whole novel, or perhaps the meaning of life. … Coventry is committed to writing fiction that’s gritty and raw and true. JOSIE SHAPIRO, READ CLOSE
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 stagger forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and transcendence through the act of art.
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. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk-infused performance, the road and the players’ relationship to violence, hate and peace. 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.