Craig Cliff
Performance by David Coventry (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2014), 464pp, $38
An academic, recently arrived in Ōtepoti from the UK, once confided in me that he had published several science fiction novels under a pseudonym. If we were to pop next door to the University Book Shop, he assured me there would be a couple of his books in stock. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell me what his pen name was for fear of his ex-wife taking a share of the royalties. I was pretty sure the claim was bulldust, but could only muster the energy for 15 minutes of fruitless online sleuthing later that evening. I was left, and am still left, having to grudgingly entertain the possibility that he may have been telling the truth, and to salute this gambit if he was fibbing.
David Coventry’s third novel, Performance, had me thinking once more about gambits. How the next move is left to the opponent and, no matter how constrained their position, the possibility of resolution still exists. In this case, Coventry presents a work not only about illness, but the text itself feels addled. The generous (and cautious) interpretation is that this must all be intentional because it is very difficult to prove otherwise. Whenever the pace begins to drag or threads are left unresolved, one must imagine Coventry, bent double with pain, saying, ‘That’s the point. Work harder! I sure am.’
Or, to take it one step further and invoke Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.’
If Performance itself is not a work of genius, its packaging—from the umpteen puns embedded in the title to the careful stage management of the cover copy—very well might be. The book is pitched as autofiction, told (mostly) in the ‘I’ voice of a writer named David Coventry. A ‘self-portrait’ that blends ‘life transcription and deep imaginative projection’ (and, sometimes, ‘purposeful unreliability’) to take us inside his experience of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), sometimes still referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome. Over the course of the novel, we also learn that Coventry has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and depression, and seems addicted to playing in post-hardcore punk bands—all of which also leave their mark on the text.
Performance begins with Coventry describing how, whenever flying between Wellington and Christchurch, he looks out the window at the Inland Kaikōura Range and thinks of the time his father, brother and his sister’s boyfriend nearly died on those slopes. We get the story of this expedition, which our narrator-hero was not part of, in short doses between contemporary reflections from Coventry on his life on a hill in Wellington, dealing with, and reading too much medical literature on, ME.
The sudden arrival of an alpine storm, his father’s tumble, the struggle of the younger men to recover the elder and get all to safety: if we’re talking about a narrative engine, then this is a V8. We read on, through the jargon and footnotes—‘In medical parlance, etiopathy refers to the consideration of the cause of an abnormal state or finding. Nociception is the sensory nervous system’s process of encoding noxious stimuli’—to get to the next instalment of the party of three mountaineers. But the mishap in the Kaikōuras is a kind of literary honey trap. You want life and death? Well, too bad. This is a story about ME, a chronic condition that the author informs us, almost chagrined, does not tend to kill its sufferers.
Instead, once Coventry has drawn us in, he moves on in different directions. Trips to the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, a tunnel beneath the Swiss Alps, and a quarantined Italian island—many of these thanks to the success of his first novel, The Invisible Mile, and the resulting invitations to literary festivals. Unlike in the Kaikōuras, Coventry is present in these extended anecdotes, which rub shoulders with stories from Auckland and Wellington, or in transit between these cities, between gigs and girlfriends, between sickness and health.
All the while, Coventry continues to intrude to tell us what it’s like to have an illness that remains poorly understood and frequently undermined—he worked on Performance as part of a PhD in Creative Writing, and the research component is on full display. But crucially, he also shows us what it is like to have ME in verbal bursts, such as when he jams with an old friend for too long and ‘[a] kind of dense vapour pulls in around the edges of the conscious mind and begins its work’, and through the forking yet unfulfilled strands of his narrative and the recurrence of scenarios (he is endlessly talking to new women in new places about death and disease).
The pitching of this novel as autofiction means the reader is constantly questioning which details, characters and events are inventions and which are real. We are not given the tools inside the text to determine where biography ends and invention begins—at least until the final few chapters when some bifurcations (characters are both dead and alive) become clear.
Of course, we needn’t limit ourselves to the text to help us diagnose the fiction. We can go online to see which literary festivals Coventry went to, or to search out traces of bands he performed in. And New Zealand is small, the community of bookish people even smaller, meaning we are all probably one phone call away from someone mentioned in the text. But that kind of detective work is not the point. Or not one of the main points, at least, of this performance. This is an impressionist self-portrait, not a Where’s Wally poster.
Autofiction has certainly had a strong 15 or so years in the Anglophone world, after emerging and thriving in Francophone literature since the 1970s. Transatlantic writers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Teju Cole have taken on the theme of Knausgårdian struggle and found new slants on the form, while in Australia Gerald Murnane has continued to write books about himself, his memories and impressions long enough that it now seems fashionable. David Coventry joins this stable of autofictioneers, not as one seeking to ride coattails, but as a writer who has found the form to convey the truth he is compelled to share. ME does not just fatigue the body but can ravage cognition. Coventry depicts his struggles to remember basic tasks, hilariously engaging multiple contractors to come and paint his house, and admits to having written scenes twice without memory of the first attempt. Thus afflicted, how could he expect to create a book exclusively from biographical fact? (How can anyone?)
The addition of metafictional elements—describing the act of writing a scene and then presenting this scene, replete with foreshadowed typos; the acknowledgements and endnotes coming before the final chapter—means this isn’t just a book about an illness, but about writing a book while ill.
Thus far, I’ve tried to approach Performance from a cautiously analytical perspective, respecting the gambit and running with it. But this is a novel that invites other reading modes, just as it invokes other ways of being. I do not have firsthand experience of ME, or any other chronic illness. The closest I have come is a recent twelve-month bout of costochondritis (inflammation of the cartilage between the ribs and sternum). For most, it goes away by itself in six to eight weeks, but for some, it can persist longer. Before I got it under control with slow-release ibuprofen, the pain was a constant burning across my chest, rising to crushing waves when startled, stressed or tired. These sensations, sometimes as if my heart was being squeezed by a fist, at others as if my sternum was a hotplate, were what my lizard brain had to work with when trying to process both the telling and showing of illness in Performance. When a scene or a precis of a medical debate was particularly affecting, I could feel the hotplate in my chest, as if the book was making me sick again. Talk about your portals of discovery!
While the analytical part of my brain struggled to make sense of the structure of the novel, another, less verbal part felt more comfortable. More than once, when I closed the book and shut my eyes, I pictured one of those subterranean cities found beneath modern-day Türkiye. Or more correctly, the artists’ renditions of these cities, always shown in cross-section, with sausage-shaped chambers carved into rock and stacked vertically, connected by steps and ventilation shafts but, ultimately, every direction, left or right or down, leads to a dead end. The only way out is the way you came in. While cities such as Derinkuyu could support up to 20,000 people, they were mainly places to escape religious persecution. A last resort.
So it may be with the narrative twists and fizzles in Performance: this is the map of the particular refuge Coventry has constructed, the one that his abilities, impairments and ambition have combined to create. At once highly intellectual and frequently deranged. A hard slog while also being urgent and necessary. A portal of self-discovery that he has shared with the world, and which enriches and alters the reading of his previous two novels. Post-punk meta-autofiction. A performance for the ages.
CRAIG CLIFF lives in Ōtepoti. He has published two novels and a story collection.
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