Dance Prone

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, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in 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.

About the Author :
David Coventry was born in 1969 in New Zealand, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Laura Southgate. Published in over fifteen counties, Coventry's debut, The Invisible Mile, was hailed in the New York Times as a 'gorgeous . . . philosophical action-adventure', was book of the week in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was described in his home country as 'one of the most gruelling novels about sport ever written', one which 'immediately places David Coventry among the elite of New Zealand authors.' He received his MA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington where he is currently completing a PhD.

Review :
His 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. Taught and intelligent, this story of music, trauma and artistic ambition has all the precision, spookiness and elegance of the best post-rock. '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 early 80's 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. 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 . . . An attempt to create the novel in it’s essence: looking for the new, resisting the obvious, denying the familiar. Pitch-perfect and nuanced . . . extraordinary . . . remarkable . . . Coventry’s work is some of the finest in recent NZ literature. A transcendental quest through the mind, body and through landscape, and a raw and raging celebration of music . . . This book is astounding.