The Grateful Dead weren't just a band. They were a lifestyle. Originally a local blues outfit known as the Warlocks, they soon ascended to the rank of house band for author Ken Kesey's "Acid Tests", and by the late 1960s became a force to be reckoned with on the national touring scene. The Dead, as many call them, helped define San Francisco's characteristic counterculture, fusing folk and Americana influences with Eastern spirituality – as well as forward-thinking experiments with futuristic tools.
But the Dead shaped far more than rock, psychedelia and '60s drug culture. Thanks to a group of music-loving tech enthusiasts, the Dead popularised what some call first real online community. Generations later, the ideas formed in this pioneering digital space still reverberate through our daily lives.
Whatever you seek in Austen – romance, family, escapism – she’ll always give you more than you asked for. That’s why it’s hard to be too upset by her ubiquity. Gimmicks bring readers, and anyone who reads her will feel her. And however much we try to cheapen her, she will always enrich us. The Romantic Collection is only available at Harrods, but the six novels can be found in any bookshop. If a new perfume is of dubious value, they are not. So when we see the next Austen innovation – whether it be a LizzieGPT girlfriend simulator or a Bonnet Girl Summer – we should feel as Anne Elliot feels on reading Captain Wentworth’s letter in Persuasion: “half agony, half hope”.
As Susan Faludi illustrated exhaustively in Backlash, ideological forces in the 1980s and ’90s, as incarnated not only in governments but by academia, journalism, and popular entertainment, were highly invested in promoting the questions of sexuality and gender as a dangerous and unsolvable mess, making cleaving to traditional family structures and gender roles a can’t-live-with-them, can’t-live-without-them situation. There exists underneath this message a reproach of twentieth-century radical movements in general, although the women’s movement was a popular punching bag: life was absurd, liberation was impossible, and compromise was the only way forward, even when we were compromising our deepest desires. The anguish lacing through the satire-obsessed ’90s burns like a hangover, at the same time mocking and cherishing the inert residue of hope that history might keep moving forward, rather than oscillating stupidly between revolution and revanchism.
The year my sister Amy was invited to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the same year Hugh had his hip replaced.
“It somehow makes sense that these two things are happening within a week of each other,” I said.
“Except I’m not doing it,” Amy told me.
The good news is that both readers who long for the comfort of the familiar and those who hope for the electricity of the unknown in Bury Our Bones should find themselves satisfied. In a sense, the book is review-proof: a huge swath of Schwab’s readership only needed to hear “new book” and “sapphic vampires” to smash the pre-order button. As a huge fan of Addie myself (I raved about it for CHIRB here) but with no particular interest in vampires, I set out with a bit more caution. I needn’t have worried. In Schwab’s hands, even the well-trod territory of immortal bloodsuckers turns fresh and new.