Performance
by David Coventry

The line between memoir and fiction is a grey one, whether writers own it or not. Increasingly they’re doing so – as with My Struggle, the six-volume sequence of ‘autofictional’ novels by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. In the United States, although still calling it a memoir, writer Jill Ciment has just published Consent, in which she takes a scalpel to her 1996 memoir Half a Life to correct its distortions now her husband has died and she need no longer stick to the ‘shared mythology’ of their marriage.

Not owning the line between memoir and fiction can cause problems. Scottish comedian Richard Gadd’s Netflix series Baby Reindeer is a drama billed as ‘a captivating true story’, leading the woman who claims to have inspired its stalker Martha to sue for US$170 million. As at least one commentator has noted, Netflix might have avoided a lot of grief by adding ‘based on’.

At first blush, Performance, David Coventry’s book about living with the debilitating disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is ‘A Novel’ because of the most basic truth (or untruth) about a memoir: no one has that good a memory, can remember that much detail from so long ago, can recall conversations as extensively and accurately as that. Any memoir worth its salt is peppered with fabrication. That’s what brings it to life.

But Coventry is too ambitious and interesting a writer to call his book a novel for so mundane a reason as that. Performance has all the qualities of the best ‘creative non-fiction’ – compelling characters, arresting situations, stimulating themes – but Coventry permits himself something more besides: points of view other than his own and fantastical flights (at one point literally) of imagination that take leave of reality altogether.

As with Coventry’s two earlier novels, The Invisible Mile (2015) and Dance Prone (2020), Performance is a giddy ride, but one weighed down by longueurs and that meanders, sometimes to places of possibly more interest to him than readers. Meaning can be elusive too. Coventry is capable of sentences of powerful precision (for example, Covid-19 lockdowns in Wellington are ‘an abominable one-act play’) but also others that are word salads. It’s to his credit, though, that, if readers work hard enough, some of these salads achieve the benefit of the doubt:

I felt the hard sun as we went silent. I put my hand up to protect my eyes, my heart barely beating in the heat. Time then, and time seeking itself, asking for answers, answers as to how it passes without speech to catch it and count it. Devouring the tail of instant after instant till it gets its answer in light, the way it clings to skin, beckoning a slow, altering burn.

Performance is, by Coventry’s admission, ‘a cryptic book for a cryptic disease’. Not that I imagine he considers this an admission, more an achievement. He’s a risk taker as a writer and in Performance he fails more often than in his earlier novels. But by and large he succeeds. And despite what it asks of us as readers – perhaps because of what it asks of us – Performance leaves more of an impression than many a more conventional book.

As might be expected from the writer of The Invisible Mile and Dance Prone, Coventry covers an astounding amount of ground in the novel, including family and personal history and of course the devastating impacts ME has had on his life, along with what is known about the disease and others like it:

[Myalgic encephalomyelitis] means the swelling of the brain, in Latin. Or close enough […] It refers to pain. It refers to a chamber of hell. It refers to debilitation of cognitive functionality. It refers to the breakdown of the nervous system, of the immune system, of the gut, cells and mitochondria. It refers phonically in a perfect physical analogue to the inability of its victims to form thoughts, create narrative about the world and those in it. Try saying it out loud. See? Try again. That’s what it’s like when we try normal sentences. It takes effort and time. Indeed, to think oneself is to remember oneself. Someone said that.

Coventry travels around New Zealand and wider afield to Ireland, Austria, and to the Italian and Swiss Alps (or rather the train tunnel under the Alps). For the longest time of all he’s on one of Italy’s volcanic islands, stranded during another Covid-19 lockdown. We meet a cast of relatives, friends and others encountered along the way and are told tales of death, war and black metal music. (Coventry is, as in Dance Prone, very good on music.) The late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard is an abiding presence.

In many ways, Performance completes a triptych started with The Invisible Mile and Dance Prone. It continues some of their themes, including the mutability and fallibility of memory, the sleights and slippages of language, who tells a story and how, the fictions we tell others and ourselves to the point they become (un)truths, the ways in which time is bent out of shape, assuming it every had a shape to start with.

And then there’s that word ‘performance’. All three books grapple with it in one way or another – how we perform our lives, memory as performance, writing as performance, the physical and mental performance required for the Tour de France in The Invisible Mile and the extended avant-punk guitar improvisations in Dance Prone, and now in Performance the intense effort needed to do anything when you have ME. In fact, the punishing exertions of cycling and music making in The Invisible Mile and Dance Prone might be read as displaced metaphorical representations of ME. The new novel also explains the excesses of its predecessors – and, for that matter, itself.

The understanding that Performance brings to Coventry’s earlier novels upends Roland Barthes’s notion of the ‘death of the author’. The author isn’t so much dead as chronically ill and knowing so revises earlier readings of those novels. Where once I thought Coventry was an ill-disciplined writer, I now know he’s anything but. I also know some of what spurs him on as a writer, which, in hindsight, is all too apparent in his novels.

On being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder after a spell of life-threatening depression, Coventry learned that people with ADD ‘have an ability to concentrate immensely on a specific task. Bore in on it. Stay there at its head until exhaustion kicks in and the shell of its thoughts lie in pieces on the screen’.

Simple jobs I was no good at. I was, in my late teens, a postman. I was fired two months in, because I couldn’t get my head around what I was supposed to be doing. Generally I sought out menial jobs and lost them just as quickly due to incompetence at the simple things. I then sought out complexity because it seemed to map what was going on in my head.

Where driving dangerously fast once gave Coventry the state of concentration that calmed his mind, he now feels the same thing ‘when writing endlessly and endlessly’. Like the Tour de France in The Invisible Mile and guitar shredding in Dance Prone, Performance is an immersive experience for readers, at times even an endurance test. But as long-distance cyclists and guitar shredders will tell you, completing such a test brings its own rewards.