Jen George's debut collection, The Babysitter at Rest, ricochets from one hellscape to another in a series of five stories that chronicle the lives of the discontented. Women are visited by ethereal, tequila-swigging Guides who chastise them for their underwhelming existences or by older businessmen who coax them to dress constantly in a bikini. At a house party, fires spontaneously erupt yet the debauchery continues, smoldering with the flames. It's an understatement to proclaim that these pieces are unlike anything else in contemporary literature. They're so far outside the spectrum it's as if they're waving from another world.
Both despite and because of its vulgarity and its surrealism, George's work reads best when fallen into headfirst. Beneath the absurdity, George provides trenchant commentary on the modern world. For example, in the story "Take Care of Me Forever," a young woman receives endless diagnoses: bulimia, a body full of broken bones, auto-pregnancy, miscarriages. She's visited by a religious counselor, who opines, "You could have tried. You could have worked hard. But mostly you could have done things differently, better." He pauses. "How was that delivery? ...Those are the lines in a local play I'm auditioning for."
There are no redemptive endings--few tidy morsels of hope or meaning in The Babysitter at Rest. Instead, it's a funhouse mirror: reflecting the world in its infinite strangeness, distorting a reality we wish we didn't know quite so well. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer