End of days

If it feels as if you’ve had to wait a despairingly long time for Bush to leave office, David Barringer sympathizes. The editor of the new anthology What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years: An Anthology of the Bush Years (Elope Press/So New Media, $20) had the book all ready to roll in 2007, when the original press, So New Media, had to put it on hold while it reorganized. The book, full of fiction and essays that reflect the strained, neurotic lives many have led the past eight years, was almost another casualty of the Bush years. So after a year of hanging onto it, Barringer scrambled to add pieces that covered 2008 and put it out himself.

“It worked out well because, it turns out, the last year was rather eventful,” Chicago native Barringer says, on the phone from his home in North Carolina. “Especially in the last six months, it was like wait a week, and the scandals just get bigger and bigger.”

In some sense, though, Barringer’s anthology isn’t dependent on the various scandals or headlines we’ve come to expect each morning. What Happened contains mostly fiction and personal essays, the kind of documents that don’t record events so much as limn the aftereffects. In “Kolli Books, Lots of Kisses,” Ghazaleh Etezal e-mails with members of her family to get a clear-eyed view of life as an Iranian woman under Ahmadinejad; “You won’t believe how terrible they treated us,” one writes. “It was as if we were animals.” Chicago author Amy Guth—who has since taken over So New Media and copublished the anthology with Barringer—contributes a personal essay in which a political gap widens the rift between her mother and her. It’s indicative of Barringer’s interest: a personal piece resonates long past a presidential term.

“A lot of the submissions I didn’t accept were rants, mostly rants about stuff writers had read,” Barringer says. “This is about the time period, not the administration. Bush bashing has been the national pastime for the last few years. You can’t still write about this stuff like it’s news.”

One of the most moving pieces in the book comes from Chicago author Spencer Dew. His essay, “Ordinary Images,” ostensibly covers the bombing of the Hebrew University cafeteria in Jerusalem on July 31, 2002, while Dew was eating lunch there. Though Dew recounts the events in searing detail—“Part of his face was dry and black and part of his face was a very pale, semi-liquid pink”—it’s Dew’s self-consciousness at putting the events into words that speaks volumes (he admits, in the next sentence, that he put off writing that image for 11 days). Dew’s essay concerns the responsibility of the writer to the subject, the way words chosen to describe an event come to define the subject: “I can’t see that man’s face anymore. I can only see the phrase I made to convey something of that man’s face to you.”

In his introduction, Barringer echoes Dew’s concern, eschewing a timeline of the aughts’ events, writing, “I wanted our childhoods, so to speak, not our memories of watching home movies.” One way to get at that “childhood” is through fiction, an art form most concerned with the mind, and one of the best pieces in the book comes from Chicago writer John H. Matthews, whose story “Bullets Have No Effect” concerns an ambiguously guilty man on death row who, despite the increasingly and absurdly brutal means employed by the government, cannot be executed. The story is funny, sure, but it’s also the sort of gimlet-eyed fantasy the last few years have made inevitable.

“I wasn’t concerned that with the fiction, that it had to be overtly political or satirical, like Primary Colors,” Barringer says . “It’s just interesting to envision people out there, writing these stories the past few years.”

What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years is out now.