Contemporary Authors

• Dorothy Project - http://dorothyproject.com/?book=the-babysitter-at-rest

  THE BABYSITTER AT REST
  JEN GEORGE

  JEN GEORGE was born in Thousand Oaks, California. She lives and works in New York City. This is her first book.

  “Reading The Babysitter at Rest is an immersion into a hidden world. It’s a place which is at first recognizable, before it becomes completely warped. Jen George has a way of bending the narrative which is distinctly her own. Her stories are at once poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in their inappropriate and reckless abandon.”
  —Matthew Barney

  For reviews and coverage, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

  Five stories—several as long as novellas—introduce the world to Jen George, a writer whose furiously imaginative new voice calls to mind Donald Barthelme and Leonora Carrington no less than Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. In “Guidance/The Party,” an ethereal alcoholic “Guide” in robes and flowing hair appears to help a thirty-three-year-old woman prepare a party for her belated adulthood; “Take Care of Me Forever” tragically lambasts the medical profession as a ship of fools afloat in loneliness and narcissism; “Instruction” chronicles a season in an unconventional art school called The Warehouse, where students divide their time between orgies, art critiques, and burying dead racehorses. Combining slapstick, surrealism, erotica, and social criticism, Jen George’s sprawling creative energy belies the secret precision and unexpected tenderness of everything she writes.

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  Read the title story, which Sheila Heti selected as the winner of BOMB Magazine‘s 2015 Fiction Contest, or check out Jen George on pub day at The Lit Hub and on Balthus at The Paris Review.

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  Granta‘s “Best Young US Novelist 2017”
  “Best Short Story Collections of 2016” electric literature
  “Best Fiction Books, 2016” entropy
  “Our Favorite Books from 2016” the believer
  “Our 20 Favorite Books of 2016” the a.v. club

  “This brilliantly caustic début collection of stories is an attack on the pieties of contemporary social life and the niceties of traditional fiction.” the new yorker

  “Despite its criticisms of greatness — or perhaps because of them — The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of stories. George’s writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal, seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable.” electric literature

  “We all know it’s commitment to something absurd that makes things funny—but in The Babysitter at Rest Jen George commits to scenarios that are not just absurd but weird in a deeply true, ‘unspeakable-underpinning-of-reality’ sort of way. And thus her commitment is both funny and kind of spiritual at the same time—and by laughing, you’re admitting this female inner universe exists. And that kind of changes everything.” miranda july

  “I had to judge a story contest of 600+ anonymous stories and I read each one and without hesitation Jen George’s story was my favourite. I’m so happy this collection exists. I feel drunk with love for these stories. They’re so funny and weird and true.” Sheila Heti

  “The next time you hear some dick say ‘women aren’t funny,’ hit them in the face with this book.” Blake Butler, “The 22 Best Books I Read in 2016,” vice

  “George goes there again and again, combining the profane and the pathetic with a rarely seen energy. When’s the last time you read an opening line this charged? ‘On a bed in the emergency room, being pumped full of morphine and oxycodone, vomiting, then being pumped full of the same medications, I recall the ways I’ve always been.’ (That little information about George is available—she was born in California and lives in New York—only heightens the appeal; her work stands alone.)” the a.v. club, grade: a

  “In The Babysitter at Rest—a brilliant and surprising debut collection of short fiction—author Jen George subverts conventional narrative form to reckon with socially imposed ideals of womanhood. Each story follows a woman in her twenties or early thirties as she negotiates the cultural expectations made upon her life and body. It’s well-trodden ground, but George hurtles us through the landscape of such archetypes with prose crude enough to be refreshing and dark enough to be funny.” BOMB

  “With a weird, beautiful energy, George explores the challenges of woman-being: singlehood, self-doubt, motherhood, the dismaying fact of aging, the (dis)ability to love. A modern-day Jane Bowles, George engages these mysteries in prose that is funny, charming, dark, and insightful.” Deb Olin Unferth

  “An absolutely killer new book of short stories by Jen George. Totally unlike anything I’ve read before. Extends the near perfect streak of Dorothy, a publishing project.” Ben Marcus (on Facebook)

  “The collection remains faithful to the Dorothy aesthetic: books that are not only strange and inventive, but strange and inventive in ways that distinguish themselves from each other. Within that family, George’s surrealist comedies are perhaps most reminiscent of Joanna Ruocco’s endlessly digressive (and marvelous) novel, Dan, published by Dorothy in 2014. . . . but George’s motley presentation and aversion to explanation mark her as a truly distinctive voice. Her frank dystopias have the charming eccentricity of Edward Gorey illustrations. They do not rely on beauty or brutality or humanistic appeals to sell themselves. Just a vision and a ghoulish sense of humor.” the millions

  “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.” shelf awareness (starred review)

  “The Babysitter at Rest is a collection of five short … stories? Or incantations. Or guides. I’m not sure how to classify them. But what I do know is that they are funny — funny because they’re true! And also funny because it’s so sad it’s true! And also just funny-funny. They are strange as heck. But underneath all the weird and the funny and the kinda gross stuff, these stories perfectly capture what it’s like being a person in the world who is just trying to figure shit out. Sometimes while reading I had to stop and ask myself, ‘How does a person write this?’ ” lenny

  “The hilarious and heartbreaking stories are long, some the length of novellas, and full of sardonic observations on the futility of what is generally considered maturity or success or love. George captures the loneliness that comes from participating in a society that feels rigged against sadness, intimacy, and genuine expression.” larb

  “George writes with an ear for raw thought patterns; her renderings of characters reproduced by their preferences and reduced to sad adulthoods are exquisite.” the village voice

  “Garish, bizarre, and pointedly funny.” vulture

  “[D]arkly humorous . . . Jen George skewers the damaging cultural imagery of acceptable female adultness.” the rumpus

  “In this surgical examination of being young, female, and unfulfilled, debut author George employs not just a scalpel, but a whole kit of ominous and eerily specific instruments. Acerbic and sly, this five-story collection explores the elaborate performance of identity . . . A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.” kirkus reviews

  “Every young writer reckons on some level with the contemporary atmosphere of minimal employment, isolating education, the impossibility of privacy and the ubiquity of etiquette; George’s method is to pump everything full of helium until the ridiculousness of it all is laid giddily bare.” the believer

  “Jen George’s wild, funny debut collection, The Babysitter at Rest, gives me [an] electric jolt.” numero cinq

  “The expectations of domineering authority figures (teachers, husbands, doctors, artists, ovulation machines) moves to obliterate [George’s] female narrators. It’s the plight of the protagonists and the hilarity of this kind of culture that creates one of the most tender and grittiest collections I have read.” entropy

  “Can’t remember the last time I read a work of fiction that showed me so many new ways to skin the old cat. George could get into the ring with Donald Barthelme.” Jeremy M. Davies

  “Confessional writing, popularized by writers such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath is often written in first person and reveals the writers’ deepest desires and motivations. Recently, emerging confessional works have been dubbed ‘slut lit’ by the LA Review of Books. Rather than using this term to shame young female authors, it is used to identify writers who are ‘wise beyond their years and [who] know a thing or two about the price women pay for constantly pleasing others.’ After devouring The Babysitter at Rest, I am moved to add Jen George to that growing list of writers.” queen mob’s teahouse

  “Like Donald Barthelme and Stanley Crawford, George marries impossible situations, gallows humor and fondness for preposterous catalogs with a radical edge.” san diego city beat

  “[I]t’s fair to say any Cremaster fans will delight in George’s surreally comic stories.” civilian

  “”Reading Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest is like having a heart-to-heart with the most bizarre babysitter you can imagine—a sly representative of a world that seems at first to be like yours but, upon inspection, reveals itself to be tinged with more weirdness, more darkness, and considerably more sex.” the arkansas international

  “For every older man who reduces a female protagonist to a sexual plaything, for every dollar that one of the characters anxiously spends to improve herself, there is a moment of understated poignancy that reveals the profound sadness of these often impassive and passive young women. George’s prose is abstract, minimal, and frequently surprising, her language just odd and funny enough to unsettle readers as much as her plots do.” the a.v. club, “Our 20 Favorite Books of 2016”

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  COVER ART: “People Preparing Themselves To Get Viciously Angry” © Lola Rose Thompson, 2016
  Lola Rose Thompson lives and works in Los Angeles. Learn more at her website.

• Culture Trip - https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/following-the-subconscious-without-self-censure-an-interview-with-jen-george/

  Following The Subconscious Without Self-Censure: An Interview With Jen George

  Michael Barron
  US Literary Editor
  Updated: 21 November 2016
  We spoke with the writer of the sleeper hit story collection The Babysitter at Rest about her unanticipated writing career, the influence of visual art, and not being afraid of your own imagination.

  Lawn School
  Featured by Scotts

  I discovered the work of Jen George through word of mouth. Several mouths actually—George appeared like an outbreak of Baader-Meinhof: within a year of publishing her first story, which also occasioned her first literary honor, all five of the fiction pieces in George’s debut collection The Babysitter At Rest—now out with the forward thinking, feminine press Dorothy Books—had been placed in magazines. Though I kept seeing her name appear and had heard good things, I really sat up when someone tweeted how a friend had ripped an excerpt of George’s story “Instruction” out of an issue of Harper’s and posted it to her. My curiosity became urgent—I was missing out.

  Reading the The Babysitter At Rest is like imbibing a sort of literary ayahuasca. Its stories are placed within phantasmagorical settings and among chimerical characters, but their purposes go further than being merely macabre: they confront what identity means when it is constantly subject to change with age. In one story “Guidance / The Party” a Virgil-like figure guides a 33-year-old woman through the preparations for her first adult party. In the title story, a babysitter plays paramour for her employer—an enigmatic and married chemical plant owner whose son, we are told, is to remain in infancy: “Your father’s good looks and his property will never be yours because you will always remain a baby,” she tells the child, adding “It is better this way.”

  At the book launch for The Babysitter At Rest, George acknowledged the influence of The Hearing Trumpet, a novel by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that has been called “the Occult Twin to Alice in Wonderland.” George’s stories also bring to mind the eldritch tales of Ontarian and fellow White Review alum Camilla Grudova, as well as the the dreamy narratives of the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernandez, once referred to as “a loopier, vegetarian Kafka.” Once could make a number of imaginative contrasts to George’s work, and in the end they would all amount to acknowledging her phenomenal originality. She was also kind enough to answer a few questions about newfound writing career.

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  You’ve had a different trajectory as writer than most people. Your first ever public reading ever was this past week despite having stories in many notable publications. In fact, it’s only been a year since Sheila Heti chose the title story from your new debut The Babysitter At Rest as the winner for Bomb’s fiction prize in 2015. Could you talk about what it’s been like to see your work go from being private, to the decision to share them, and the quick praise and subsequent publication they have received?

  It’s been encouraging. I thought it’d be terrifying having work in the world- to have this thing you’ve committed to with your name on it that people can reject or dismiss, and also define you by, but it’s actually been fine—both because I haven’t really paid attention to the book as a product in the world, and because I’ve been fortunate enough to deal with very nice people who are inviting and welcoming and friendly and understand the book. I think I expected people to tell me I didn’t belong, but for the most part that hasn’t happened. Just before I submitted the title story to BOMB I thought I’d stop writing. I’d been working in isolation—I had no one at all reading my work, most people I know didn’t know that I wrote. But after awhile working in a vacuum starts to kind of disappear the work, or your drive to make it.

  I’d come to a point where I thought I should maybe stop writing and try to lower my ambitions and get a decent paying job instead of a bad paying job, even though I’d never successfully done that before. The only reason I submitted the title story in the collection to the BOMB contest was because the judge was Shelia Heti, who I thought might like it, and because I actually read BOMB—it was kind of a first attempt and a last ditch effort to put my work into the world. The story that was submitted was initially rejected by interns—it didn’t make it to the editors, so it didn’t make it to the Shelia Heti, but then Shelia Heti went back and read all of the contest submissions and saved the story from the slush pile. Had that not happened, I don’t think I would have submitted anywhere else. The experience of having work that’s been well received by the people or places I regard highly has been nice—it’s like I’ve been given the permission or opportunity I’d needed to keep writing.

  You utilize feminine, uncanny, erotic, and domestic tropes to magnetic effect. Different details come to forefront with each read, many of them are bizarre, but somehow always comprehensible in the way dreams can be. When you are piecing these stories together, do you let your imagination go “off the leash” so to speak? Are you ever made uncomfortable by where it takes you?

  I’d say I trust in imagination as part of the process—but imagination can be called other things, like subconscious or intuition. It’s from that more subconscious place that the things you mentioned sort of come together, or at least are not as categorically separate as they are in daily life. I see the uncanny fictive space as a distilled reality where hidden thoughts and ideas behaviors and energies become magnified. We learn how to order our worlds and language so that we can understand our surroundings and function and fit into the world we’re perceiving, and in this book I was interested in what happens when the behaviors and beliefs and perceptions that make up a person or a partial life start to come undone, and how the performance of these things without connection is just that- performance—and I was interested in what lived in that space—which turned out to be a lot of things I had not necessarily anticipated.

  I was interested in this landscape where there are fewer barriers between concepts, or where things are more conceptually collapsed, and in focusing on characters in these worlds where their internal perceptions take up the entire frame. I don’t write with an outline, and most of the time without an idea of what I’m writing in a larger conceptual sense, so in that regard I let my imagination or subconscious take over. I’ve come to trust in those things as part of the creative process rather than see those things as being self-indulgent. Imagination is a good source to draw from— it’s kind of like how kids play, they aren’t sitting around worried about holes in linearity or narrative leaps—like how will it make sense to get from this planet to another, how is this person flying, how are they breathing underwater and drinking tea underwater, how are we in outer space now—they just make these jumps, and logic around the narrative kind of falls into place and things appear as they need to.

  I think I follow the subconscious or intuitive without much self-censure, so that’s where a lot of the sex in the book comes from. I find sex and the body to be very relevant to the work—to this book in particular. I don’t set out to write about sex but it always comes up, almost how it does in dreams—it’s just there. If people reading certain things in the book are uncomfortable, I think that’s sort of an interesting result of the product of the book, though I can’t say I felt uncomfortable writing it. I think it’s actually a strange idea to be uncomfortable or embarrassed in the very internal space of writing or creating anything—like this is stuff I think about, so it’s a territory that should be explored- otherwise what’s the point. At times when I think about people I know reading it, that’s a little different—especially when they’re not looking me in the eye while telling me the book is racy or gritty or using these other code words that mean sexually graphic and weird.

  So, maybe then I’m a little uncomfortable, like in a polite-society sense, when we’re eating dinner together and the person who has read my book is maybe imagining an older man sticking his finger up my ass, as though this is a memoir, but even with that I’m interested in what’s past embarrassment, or in not seeing embarrassment as something that just shuts you down—I think a lot of people just stop when they get embarrassed, I think I used to just stop there. I think it’s important to move through it, I’m interested in what’s past that point, both personally and in my work.

  Photo courtesy of the author
  Photo courtesy of the author
  Before this you were working on a television pilot In the Production Office, which you both wrote and starred in. How does fiction and screenwriting play off of each other in your mind? Are you still interested in working in film as you continue to write fiction?

  I haven’t thought about filmmaking in awhile. I spent a lot of time with this collection and now I’m writing a novel, so I’ve been in that internal space that writing fiction kind of requires or creates. I think fiction has always been the more natural fit for me. Filmmaking has so many moving parts- I never figured out how to make it work the way I wanted. It requires such a different type of energy than writing alone. I think it’d be a challenge to return to because I’d have to approach it in a totally new way. I have no idea how to set about doing what I’d like to with film, which sounds kind of exciting because if I tried to do something in film, even just screenwriting, I’d have to think about a whole new set of creative and logistical problems that don’t exist when you have control over your world and your product the way you do with fiction. I’m attracted to the collaborative aspect of filmmaking, and even screenwriting, where you have to willingly surrender identity or control in a way I haven’t had to do for years, but at the same time I’ve been pretty satisfied with how autonomous fiction allows me to be.

  You seem to have a strong connection to art—both Matthew Barney and Miranda July are admirers of your work—and you’ve mentioned your own admiration for people such as sculptor and filmmaker Mike Kelley and the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington, especially her novel The Hearing Trumpet. Could you talk about how your relationship to art and artists has informed your writing?

  I’m interested in the approach to narrative that I see in visual and performance art, and the conceptual perversion that occurs in those spaces, and the subversive product of those mediums. Seeing or being around visual and performance art are really effective in making me think differently or more clearly or even just feel excited about possibilities in making my own work. I don’t have formal training, so I probably don’t consider text alone as holy as maybe people who have more of a formal literary education. The things I’ve been interested in, both with text and art, are the things I’m instinctively drawn to or get kind of obsessed with or possessed by more than what’s maybe considered good or fashionable- I’m pretty ignorant about certain writers or artists that maybe I should know.

  I’ve always been a more internal person, or maybe just alone, and I’ve pieced together what I like by finding things I could make personal from a lot of different places, so I think that’s reflected in my work. When I was a teenager on my own in Oakland I got into reading these heavy esoteric texts I didn’t quite understand and all this advanced astrology stuff I really did not get, but read anyway, and that way I learned how to kind of take things and read them in my own distorted manner and make them my own. College wasn’t really an option for me because I came from a large family without much money-from the time I was a teenager I had to work full time to pay rent and to eat, I’d found high school boring and miserable, but books and art always appealed to me—I always wanted to be a writer.

  When I first moved to New York, I worked at the old Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway—which is now a Foot Locker, I think. That job paid minimum wage, but we could read all day, so when I worked downstairs where all the plays and political books and philosophy were kept, I read a lot of plays and philosophy all kinds of communist and socialist texts that made an impression. We had the booklists from all the classes at Cooper Union, so I’d give the students, who were my age, their stacks of books, and then I read whatever was on their reading lists, from more fundamental stuff like all the Russians, to more abstruse stuff, lots of French and German philosophy—that’s also where I first read DeBeauvoir and Beckett and other authors and books I liked that I maybe wouldn’t have been otherwise exposed to at that young an age. I read without any context, no class or teacher to kind of anchor the work, no one to talk with about the stuff in the books, and no past literary experience from which I could contextualize the work myself, so everything was just very internal and filtered through my personal lens.

  In general I think I have a strange and maybe wrong way of reading things since it’s so outside of any academic training, but I think that’s actually a good place to work from, or maybe the only place to work from since the personal is most primary. There’s some osmosis or alchemy that occurs just by being with or around something—that’s partly why performance can be so powerful. When I started paying attention to visual art, it was like that—I liked the energy of certain things, or was around certain work that I liked. Visual and performance art seemed like a way out of straight or everyday life and a way into a life I wanted for myself, so I started paying attention to visual art in the way I’d read other things I maybe didn’t get at first, and then after awhile visual art became an equal, or at times greater, creative source for me than literature. I find the product or involvement of visual and performance art almost more experientially communal because these forms are so open to interpretation and tend to be more conceptually and physically experimental, with higher stakes and a higher risk of failure than you generally see in something as polished as a published book. I think I’m inspired to raise the bar for my own work most when I see art that I find really great, maybe more so than when I read a great book and just feel sort of overwhelmed.

  I’d picked up The Hearing Trumpet when seeing Leonora Carrington’s name on the cover of the book because I’d remembered seeing Self-Portrait at the Met years earlier, and that image and her name had stuck with me. The book was kind of the same as the painting- mesmerizing and whole and totally unique and radical. Her worlds are so full. Reading that book was kind of like the last piece of the puzzle for me after internalizing so much work and seeing a way I could actually make something. So, in that sense, I think anything I write is homage to Carrington because without her example I doubt I could have understood that making work I wanted to make was possible, that I was allowed enter these stranger territories though fiction. So I had her in mind when writing, and at the same time I was around a lot of (literally and figuratively) big work by male artists, which in certain physical aspects was polar to Carrington’s work.

  During the time I was working on this book, there were all these huge exhibitions and retrospectives in the city that were almost exclusively the work of men, which wasn’t at all new or surprising, but I started thinking about it in a different way. I felt really inspired by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley and their work informed how I thought about narrative- especially Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done and Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) and Odalisque, all of which influenced how I thought about constructing the narrative in the book. But this same work that was proving to be a creative source also had a direct influence on the larger narrative of the book in a more meta sense because I became interested in the place of the unrealized female artist in the space of an abstracted patriarchal capitalist art and political culture, and I became interested in viewing that space pretty exclusively from the perspective of the young female. As a result, this book is pretty connected with visual art and with specific artists.

  If I remember correctly, you were previously working on a novel that you were “determined to handwrite,” before putting it down to focus on the stories that would become The Babysitter At Rest. Has finishing these stories given you a better sense of how to return to novel writing? And are you working on something at the moment?

  Before starting this collection, I’d been writing by hand after not writing for a bit and it turned out to be a really creatively generative process and a novel started to develop. The handwritten novel kept growing, and at no point did it occur to me to put it on the computer. I started seeing this bigger picture for that novel and soon notebooks were filled with kind of frantic handwriting, and then every page of every notebook was filled with dozens of post-it’s that were notes on characters, relationships, lines of dialogue, and references to other points in the book that were lost in other post-its. It got really out of control and I got to a point where instead of being excited about it, I looked at the notebooks with dread- like there is no way I can ever transcribe all of this and this story is so huge.

  When writing this collection I learned how to be a lot more disciplined in the process—not chasing every single thing that came up, and writing on a computer so that I could keep track of things that did, so I was able to focus in a way I wasn’t when writing by hand. This collection was a lot more controlled than that novel was. I think I learned that I had to be able to move things around physically, like cut and paste lines and whole paragraphs. Writing this collection taught me how to make things as full as possible in a controlled space, how to maximize what the form will allow, and how to be more centered in the work in a way that I hadn’t been previously. I’m currently working on a novel about a women’s art collective—I’m still in the in the early stages, but so far the process is very different than it was with Babysitter.

• LA Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jen-george/

  Jen George
  Jen George is the author of the short story collection The Babysitter at Rest, out with Dorothy, a publishing project. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harper’s, n+1, the White Review, and other places. She was born and raised in Southern California, and now spends her time between Los Angeles and New York.

The Babysitter at Rest
Publishers Weekly.
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Babysitter at Rest
Jen George. Dorothy a Publishing Project (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (168p) ISBN 9780­9973666­2­4
In this debut story collection, George puts a roster of listless women through trials both dismally familiar
and captivatingly surreal. In the title story, a caretaker for a baby who will never grow old has an affair with
his father (though he provides her with little beyond "chaffed nipples" and "blisters") and takes up painting.
"My memory is mostly gone, though not entirely," she assures the reader, and the same could be said of the
narrator of "Take Care of Me Forever," who is constrained to an "armless body cast" and is sleeping with an
"artist/doctor" who boasts that he is "dabbling in shamanism." And of the art student in "Instruction," who
studies under a "Teacher/older man with large hands" at a Queens race track, where the curriculum includes
"digging horse graves." Set among this index of libidinous, male authority figures, the introspection of
"Futures in Child Rearing" is a refreshing change of pace. Here, a woman equipped with an "ovulation
machine" contemplates naming a baby "Horace" or "You Have Reached Your Destination." Rather than
being bogged down by compulsive sexuality or fickle, philosophical notions like "god is a clock with
memory, logging hours," "Futures in Child Rearing" resonates in the simple way it presents an outlandish
mind, as when the narrator muses, "I do not want any son of mine resembling a horse facially. " (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Babysitter at Rest." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236412&it=r&asid=50e20ee9fe69576c43bcf53efa6821cc.
Accessed 7 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236412

• Entropy
  https://entropymag.org/the-babysitter-at-rest-by-jen-george/
  Word count: 1783

  LITERATUREREVIEW
  THE BABYSITTER AT REST BY JEN GEORGE
  written by Jennifer Christie October 4, 2016

  The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
  Dorothy, October 2016
  168 pages – Dorothy / Amazon

  Reading the stories of Jen George’s debut collection The Babysitter at Rest was akin to witnessing a distress signal explode directly into my face—a flare made out of the remnants of garbage, used paint brushes, thimbles full of absinth, giant mirrors, ice cream cones, dirty bikini bottoms, expired weight loss tea, dead horses, and black spinal fluid. There is absurdity in every story (a “forever baby,” a hospital’s “Mummification Room”), and yet I felt like I knew these absurdities from the reality of my own life—or, rather, I’d encountered them in a kind of danger that comes with age and knowledge. The wounds of self-doubt and painful self-awareness manifest in a myriad of ways throughout life, and, despite myself, I related deeply to the inner landscape of George’s narrators.

  What unites these five stories is a distinct and alarming female loneliness—George’s characters wallow in a pool of stagnancy, the missed opportunities of their twenties. They are not, in any apparent way, successful, are possibly barren, and seem consumed by their failures. However, what saturates this loneliness is George’s deadpan humor. In the first story, “Guidance/The Party,” the narrator (a thirty-three year old woman) is given an unsentimental pep talk from “the Guide,” who will be her ethereal coach in preparation for a party she must host in order to be saved from her own inability to transition into adulthood:

  ‘Though you’re visibly aging, you’ve failed to transition properly and now is the last hour.’ The Guide enters my kitchen and looks over my tea collection: teas for energy, for shitting, for sleep, for being calm, for being present, for liking what I’ve been given, for being my inherent self—most of which are long expired.

  Implied in this, the collection’s opening scene, is the image of a subject embodied by all she lacks, a woman who at thirty-three is already decaying. No babies, no boyfriends, no husband, no semblance of cherished stability, no book or art deal, a body that is going. That’s what you need a Guide for—to make you right, to make you whole, to force you back into the light of productivity no matter how undisciplined of a human you’ve become. (What has she been doing all this time, the Guide would like to know. “‘Looking around. Watching stuff on TV. Having weird dreams. Eating sandwiches.’”)

  But there are remedies to all this. Roll your neck, whip your arms, elongate your neck to stave off the turkey wobble. No more sitting in the shower; no more television; no more social anxiety; no more complaining about not being a genius. Like a weird mash-up of a gender-neutral angel and bored Kardashian-like neighbor friend, the Guide wanders around the narrator’s apartment dispensing the implied wisdom and subtext of every self-help book and women’s magazine I’ve read: If you are not happy, you are failing. If you are not trying to be happy, you are losing. Even a faker of happiness is a winner in some way, or at least inspiring. That adage “Fake it ‘til you make it” seems forever apropos.

  It is both hilarious and heartbreaking that the defining characteristic of George’s narrators are their earnest and damnedest attempts to flit through the narrow gates of acceptable 21st century adulthood, in this story portrayed to the hilarious extreme—the narrator takes it for granted that 10,001-ingedient mole sauce (with albino peacock talon paste), a self-given enema, diuretic “shit” teas, and large quantities of flower bouquets adorning a party everyone will show up to and probably rank as poor to middling are not just impressive, but sure proof of inhabiting an authentically adult sphere. This is her “last hour” party after all, and the stakes are high, at least in the eyes of the Guide, who, even so, leaves mid-story to get back to its own life. In the end, it’s left ambiguous as to if this party is truly a defining moment for the narrator’s continuing forward momentum, and something more than just a formidable and desperate public display of getting her shit together. Even after she throws the party, we won’t know if she ever does.

  On the flip side, however, George’s harsh portrayals present us with a mainstream society that now seems rigged, destined towards its own insane horizon. What becomes revealed more than a woman’s various failures is the inherent absurdity of a patriarchal hierarchy where women are equated to sexual treats and the apogee of their existence is procreation. In a world where mothers are debating whether to name their unborn children Whirling Dervish (girl) or Phallus Maximus (boy), we must question everything.

  The prize of the collection is “The Babysitter at Rest.” It is messy and perfect, and unlike any story I have read before. “I’ve been given a fresh start, a new beginning,” says the narrator. “It’s almost like being reborn, but without birth and childhood. I get to start as a young adult, when you are capable of looking after yourself and making decisions. When your body is in its prime. The only rules are you start pretty broke, and you have to have roommates.” The narrator is allowed to work in a newspaper office because she is interested in the arts, where her duties include ordering sandwiches and watering potted plants. Hobbies are essential here, so she takes up growing tomato seeds; she paints a little, but her roommate is better at this—she seems better than the narrator at everything. The narrator begins an affair with Tyler Burnett a pedophiliac chemical plant owner who is married to the successful artist she wishes she could be and with whom he has a forever baby, a baby that will never age and becomes the narrator’s main charge.

  There’s such a dysfunctional dread to all this—for instance, the inappropriate sex scenes between her and Tyler Burnett who feeds the narrator ice cream and candy on their excursions to the ocean. “ ‘Child,’” he says, “ ‘please don’t pursue obscure aspirations of becoming something, though I know you wouldn’t know how to even if you wanted. It’d spoil you. You are better the way you are.’” To be a prize, she must remain hopeless. She fills her days with trips to the swimming pool, and eventually wears nothing but a bathing suit at all times, having inexplicably lost the rest of her wardrobe. As she watches Tyler’s forever baby, she realizes she can only interact with it a handful of ways, because it’s will never achieve the potential she and others squander.

  ‘It is a curse to have a forever baby’ [says Tyler Burnett]. ‘The baby will not inherit my property, my good looks. I thought the point of having a baby was so you could age and die. You could be released after cursing someone else into this existence. With this baby sealed in infancy, I fear I may live a very, very long time. I age, but I’m not dying. I can think of nothing worse.’

  Tyler’s and the baby’s plight extend to the worlds in each of George’s stories—that there is no such thing as true success without a wink of acknowledgment that success is measured by the lame ideals of a condescending society that celebrates individualism and shuns community. The parody of the self-aggrandizing leader/artist is both a comical and sinister black hole: “ ‘Cry for my little penis, you stupid fucking bitch,’” says a painter to the narrator in “Take Care of Me Forever” as he paints himself into a matador scene with a pile of slain bulls at his feet. And she does, because when it comes to mourning, she could have been a professional, and this, unquestionably, is what the little penis wants.

  These stories are weird, and get weirder as they get darker; that’s the beauty of the collection. In “Instruction” a group of art students attend an orientation that includes lying for five days on black trash bags without moving, eating, or drinking. They must vomit, shit, and infect themselves in a kind of pseudo cleanse meant to reveal the smallness of their existences. They have orgies, bury dead racehorses, and compete for the attention of the Teacher/older man with large hands who keeps a jar of nail clippings from the last thirty years on his desk and expects sexual dalliances in his office. The plot and characters descend into a kind of rabid whirlpool of sex, art, and narcissism. This final story makes the collection an homage to lost dreams of identity and recalls the first story “Guidance/The Pary”: ‘I first forgot who I was when I was very young,’ whispers the narrator to the Guide as it sleeps.

  …At the moment of realization, I walked out of my backyard and into the street. I was able to see the world spinning. It went very fast and made me dizzy. A police officer pulled over and said, ‘What is a little girl doing out here alone?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where do you live?’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said…I didn’t know the answer to any of his questions. I was someone else after that, and since then I’ve forgotten who I was and have become someone else completely over and over again.

  The expectations of domineering authority figures (teachers, husbands, doctors, artists, ovulation machines) moves to obliterate these female narrators. It’s the plight of the protagonists and the hilarity of this kind of culture that creates one of the most tender and grittiest collections I have read. That forever baby haunts me—a baby who never ages, who traps adults into roles they are incapable of transcending, never evolving, who keeps the babysitter in a state of arrested development, forever at rest, but who itself, in a way, is saved from this awful mess, the mess of life, the mess of being a woman or a man: “ ‘Your father’s good looks and his property will never be yours because you will always remain a baby,’” says the narrator. “ ‘It is better this way.’”

• AV Club
  http://www.avclub.com/review/deadpan-and-dark-babysitter-rest-best-kind-unsettl-244085
  Word count: 889

  Deadpan and dark, The Babysitter At Rest is the best kind of unsettling
  By Laura Adamczyk @Laura_Adamczyk
  Oct 17, 2016 12:00 AM

  Image: "People Preparing Themselves To Get Viciously Angry," Lola Rose Thompson
  Image: "People Preparing Themselves To Get Viciously Angry," Lola Rose Thompson
  15

  A
  The Babysitter At Rest

  Author: Jen George
  Publisher: Dorothy
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  The stories in The Babysitter At Rest by Jen George follow the logic and tenor of a nightmare. Fears and truths hide within distorted images and exaggerated worry. Characters inhabit familiar yet off-balance worlds. In one story, a feckless 33-year-old is instructed on how to improve herself by a tequila-chugging, robe-wearing guide, because she’s failed to transition properly into adulthood. In another, a woman goes into massive debt trying to have a baby, an ovulation machine spitting out snide readings to her like an abusive Magic 8 Ball. These stories are also hilarious, combining deadpan, often abstract language to create an original, confident debut that continually threatens to run off the rails but never does.

  In the first story, “Guidance / The Party,” the aforementioned guide is the embodiment of the kind of impossible mandates offered in women’s beauty magazines and the Facebook feeds of Goop-reading, self-improving acquaintances announcing gluten-free diets and pilates regimens. Except the guide’s tactic is not one of blissful motivation, but of inducing anxiety by playing off the protagonist’s fear that there is a time limit on achieving happiness:

  We find you at the point of early decay. Decay sets in with the loss of possibility, not having children, having children, a string of failures over years, memories, jobs, aging, becoming out-of-shape, losing your looks, realizing you’re a one-trick pony or fraud or nothing special, and understanding things too late.

  The second half of the story is taken up by the party the protagonist is mandated to throw, featuring amazing comic details like a 10,101-ingredient mole, a record called Dance Songs Of Times Forgotten (It’s later noted, “No one thinks of times forgotten.”), and a lewdly violent tarot pack. It’s an auspicious beginning to a collection that only raises the stakes as it goes on.

  Reminiscent of Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon in its absurdist portrayal of depraved sexuality, The Babysitter At Rest exaggerates sex to the edge of grotesque. The male characters are reduced to their basest instincts, while the female characters are often mere shells, valued above all else for their youth, sexuality, and only occasionally their promise to do something worthwhile. Each goes along with the requests of whichever erection-wielding man who’s taken a fancy to her: There’s the older man in the title story who has the narrator exclusively wear a bikini and saddle shoes (she ends up losing all her other clothing by story’s end); the artist-psychiatrist of “Take Care Of Me Forever” who masturbates while in session and makes the narrator his art project; and “The Teacher/older man with the large hands” in “Instruction” who wants the protagonist as both a sexual plaything and protégé.

  But George doesn’t beat up her protagonists for the sake of salacious shock. Just as it seems like she’s pushed too far into the absurd, George grounds her stories in quiet and very much earned poignancy. In “Instruction,” for example, the main character exercises some agency by leaving her teacher/lover’s art school, rendered as a rat-infested warehouse where students have orgies and are tasked with burying dead horses (that she leaves for, at one point, a convent says something about the hilariously limited options available to her). And this melancholy passage from the title story, while wryly funny, portends the tone of its ending:

  Time goes quickly and little is ever accomplished. It’s unclear if there is just nothing to accomplish, or if there are endless things. I go swimming often. I spend hours at the pool. I meet people, older women and kids, who like to play water games like splash-in-the-face, drown-a-bitch, and punchies-and-kickies.

  George goes there again and again, combining the profane and the pathetic with a rarely seen energy. When’s the last time you read an opening line this charged? “On a bed in the emergency room, being pumped full of morphine and oxycodone, vomiting, then being pumped full of the same medications, I recall the ways I’ve always been.” (That little information about George is available—she was born in California and lives in New York—only heightens the appeal; her work stands alone.)

  The Babysitter At Rest is a complete, cohesive collection of stories, in part because its protagonists are variations on a theme: women willing to debase themselves for love, sex, or some other kind of improvement in their lives. The book is also about what it means to be an artist—someone else in these stories who debases herself for the chance at another’s esteem. Yet, as demonstrated by the protagonist’s lemming-like classmates in the final story, not all artists have original thoughts of their own. Lucky for us, George doesn’t have that problem.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jen-george/babysitter-rest/
  Word count: 463

  THE BABYSITTER AT REST
  by Jen George
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  In this surgical examination of being young, female, and unfulfilled, debut author George employs not just a scalpel, but a whole kit of ominous and eerily specific instruments.

  Acerbic and sly, this five-story collection explores the elaborate performance of identity and the palliative comfort of opting out of self-obsessed scenesterism, giving a knowing flick of the hand to artistic imitators and impostors alike. Plunging up to her elbows into the morass of (post)modern living, George picks apart things often mistaken for love (desperation, fearful neediness, projected desires, ego propping) and maturity (partnering, parenting, settling into a beige-and-vanilla existence after a clean break with youthful pursuits). Details accumulate haltingly, stepwise, like bits of a dream remembered upon waking, even as they threaten to slip from the dreamer's grasp, and George walks us through a thick fog with a dim flashlight alongside characters who can't quite apprehend the rules of the familiar-but-foreign places into which they've been flung. In "Guidance/The Party," a woman is brusquely prepped by a recondite entity, known only as "The Guide," for an adulthood more like an afterlife than a continuation of her earlier existence. In the title story, a cross between a reincarnation tale, an anxiety dream, and a particularly prurient version of “The Sims,” the narrator is given the chance to start over—from where, what, and by whom is never revealed—as a young woman of uncertain age in a place like a spurious micronation on the cusp of collapse. Though George occasionally dips into gratuitous weirdness and has a tendency toward list-making that can become tedious, overall these stories satisfy as they spit out one sardonic insight after the next. Take "Futures In Child Rearing," on the confusion, anxiety, and pressures that surround procreation: "I'm trying to have a baby. I'd like to name her Ocean, but I fear the implications: the void, the vast emptiness, the unknown, big whale shits, giant octopuses, or other possible hentai tentacle situations. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: Transaction Declined, it reads on the screen." By the final story, "Instruction," we can't be sure if we've been given a glimpse into a future where our absurdities have played out to their furthest extremes or perhaps the actual present, only we haven't quite realized yet the extent of our collective abjection.

  A headlong charge through the process of becoming—an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.

  Pub Date: Oct. 17th, 2016
  Page count: 168pp
  Publisher: Dorothy
  Review Posted Online: July 20th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016

• Publishers Weekly
  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9973666-2-4
  Word count: 254

  The Babysitter at Rest

  Jen George. Dorothy, a Publishing Project (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-0-9973666-2-4

  In this debut story collection, George puts a roster of listless women through trials both dismally familiar and captivatingly surreal. In the title story, a caretaker for a baby who will never grow old has an affair with his father (though he provides her with little beyond “chaffed nipples” and “blisters”) and takes up painting. “My memory is mostly gone, though not entirely,” she assures the reader, and the same could be said of the narrator of “Take Care of Me Forever,” who is constrained to an “armless body cast” and is sleeping with an “artist/doctor” who boasts that he is “dabbling in shamanism.” And of the art student in “Instruction,” who studies under a “Teacher/older man with large hands” at a Queens race track, where the curriculum includes “digging horse graves.” Set among this index of libidinous, male authority figures, the introspection of “Futures in Child Rearing” is a refreshing change of pace. Here, a woman equipped with an “ovulation machine” contemplates naming a baby “Horace” or “You Have Reached Your Destination.” Rather than being bogged down by compulsive sexuality or fickle, philosophical notions like “god is a clock with memory, logging hours,” “Futures in Child Rearing” resonates in the simple way it presents an outlandish mind, as when the narrator muses, “I do not want any son of mine resembling a horse facially.” (Oct.)

• Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-the-babysitter-at-rest-by-jen-george/
  Word count: 1265

  Book Review: The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George

  In the first story of Jen George’s debut collection The Babysitter at Rest, a nameless genderless Guide climbs through the window of the narrator’s apartment to usher her into adulthood. “Despite your lack of intuition,” they tell her, “you may have become aware of the following changes that signal the onset of adulthood: listening to others, doubting everything you think, health problems, understanding of the limitations of time and/or life/living/the individual experience…” the list goes on. Such mounting neuroses are experienced by not only our first narrator, but by all of the female protagonists that populate George’s stories. Given the absurd circumstances surrounding these women, it’s not hard to understand the source of their anxieties. One character racks up debt in her attempts to have a baby, which include purchasing an ovulation machine that, instead of telling her when she is ovulating, berates her; in the title story the protagonist chooses to start her life anew as a young adult, where she is “anywhere from seventeen to twenty-two,” and “the only rules are you start pretty broke and you have to have roommates”; another experiences misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis from hospital doctors, who probe her in the Gynecological Exploration room and place her in a full-body cast. Yet despite the heightened strangeness of these fictive worlds they retain a disturbing similarity to our own, largely through the ways their absurd settings examine society’s influence on women.

  In the first story, “Guidance/The Party,” a manual the Guide hands our narrator instructs her on how to prepare for the party that will officially mark her entrance into adulthood. It advises to eat only “light foods,” as “a young woman eating fried foods, cream sauces, cheeses, potatoes, and cakes is charming; an adult woman eating those same foods is grotesque.” Throughout her collection, George highlights society’s unattainable yet accepted social expectations for women, and she’s sharpest when skewering these expectations for the female body. Women are frequently not eating, or eating very little, such as the subject of “Take Care of Me Forever,” who even in her own drug-induced dream, which takes place at a hotel, eats “small cakes” at the “children’s/wives’ table” while the other guests feast on meats hunted by her husband. George also probes the idea of physical beauty as currency, such as in the final story, “Instruction,” which begins with our protagonist stating: “I was sexually attractive, which is highly valued in college and art circles, as well as other hierarchal scenes mimicking the structure of capitalism wherein older men with large hands finger younger women.” In a collection that features mostly passive women floating dreamlike through their lives, this self-awareness and unflinching humor saves them from a lack of agency.

  Though these women are unsure of where they’re going or what they’re meant to be doing, their minds move with unrelenting energy, thoughts spiking like the needle of a seismograph. In “Futures in Childrearing,” the narrator contemplates names for her not-yet-conceived baby with unrestrained imagination:

  I’d like to name him Horace. He will be a lyric poet and a Sagittarius. He will bat his eyelashes and men and women will swoon in the streets. He’ll write an autobiography dedicated to his loving mother who resides in a chalet in the Swiss Alps. I wave from the mountain as I ski down an expert slope while wearing top-of-the-line gear in the film about his life.

  The turbulent minds of George’s protagonists are constantly disrupting the stories’ narratives, making it impossible to predict what they will think, do, or screw up next. Much like these women, the reader is rarely on firm footing, but George’s hilarious and confident prose promises that this destabilization will lead to honest insights about our own world.

  The stories are particularly adept at illuminating the ways in which men can become obstacles to women achieving their potential. George’s women aren’t directionless simply because they lack drive—they have been discouraged (with frighteningly innocuous intent) from reaching for more. “Child, please don’t pursue obscure aspirations of becoming something, though I know you wouldn’t know how to even if you wanted,” says Tyler Burnett, the love interest of the main character in the title story. Another character, Lee, completes an ambitious art project only to have her Teacher, with whom she is having an affair, say: “[T]his is the best thing you will ever do.” Men are frequently undermining female ambition through their own beliefs about women’s capabilities. It’s unsurprising that these men circumscribe women’s competence so narrowly, given their propensity for overriding female narratives with their own. In “Take Care of Me Forever,” the narrator attempts to communicate the symptoms of her illness to her male doctor, who calls them “psychosomatic…much like your mother’s fear of dying on an operating table. “But she did die on an operating table,” she informs him. “According to the records, she told everyone in the hospital she was going to die on that table. It was labeled suicide by self-fulfilling prophecy,” he tells her. Like in most of George’s stories, here the male voice possesses unquestioned authority. “My mother committed suicide?” the protagonist asks, failing to protest. This authority gives men the power to not only override female narratives, but rewrite them completely.

  The men of these stories do not only attempt to curb women’s ambition, but also their love and desire. When Teacher tells Lee that he was once in love with his aunt, she replies that she used to have “crushes on older guys,” but Teacher quickly dismisses Lee’s former attractions as unequal to his own: “No, not like that. I was actually in love with my aunt.” In “Take Care of Me Forever,” the doctor refuses to endorse the narrator’s sexual desire or expression of love. He instructs her to masturbate, then prevents her from achieving orgasm by penetrating her. When she tells him she loves him afterwards, he says, “Shhh,” and then, to further erase her words, “You have a tightass pussy.” In these stories sex is not an act defined by mutual love and desire, but male pleasure. In the title story Tyler Burnett explains that he enjoys sex with the protagonist, Child because of her youth: “[W]e screw young girls a special way, with the intention of forgetting everything we’ve ever been.” He uses sex with Child as a tool for erasing his past and altering his own identity, without considering her separate sexual desires. Even his decision to call the unnamed protagonist Child (who is actually a young woman) infantilizes her and reinforces his own power in the relationship. Here women are not sexual partners—they are objects to fuck, gateways to male satisfaction.

  The Babysitter at Rest highlights the absurdity of what our own society demands from women, while analyzing the different vessels—men, food, sex—through which these demands are delivered. George’s stories encourage us to examine the weirdness of our own lives, and returning to reality after reading this collection is like standing up after a series of somersaults: familiar ground feels suddenly precarious. Readers may find themselves wondering which world is stranger: George’s, or our own?

  Publication date: October 17, 2016

  Publisher: Dorothy

  Reviewed by Alina Grabowski

• The Millions
  http://www.themillions.com/2017/01/the-way-individuals-survive-on-jen-georges-the-babysitter-at-rest.html
  Word count: 1324

  The Way Individuals Survive: On Jen George’s ‘The Babysitter at Rest’
  By MICHAEL DEAGLER posted at 12:00 pm on January 18, 2017 0
  cover

  There’s a point late in Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest when an aspiring artist named Lee earns entry into an arts program held inside the Aqueduct racetrack during the offseason. While there, between cleaning concession stands and burying dead horses, she is expected to a complete one large art project each month. For her first month, Lee paints “Your Unceasing Fantasy Will Not Conjure the Desired into Being,” “a series of one hundred watercolors depicting women in various states of longing/desire/dreaming/despair with their eyes slightly crossed, mouths mostly open, vaginas reluctantly dry.” Her instructor, known as “The Teacher/older man with large hands,” decrees that the work is “sexy as hell while being totally amateur and bad.” Lee soon ends up sleeping with him. This section of the story is bears the title “Early work.”
  This debut collection, out now from Dorothy, a publishing project, may represent George’s early work, though there is nothing amateur or bad about it. (Sexiness, of course, remains subjective.) The five stories contained within the book can certainly be seen as five portraits of women in various stages of longing/desire/dreaming/despair. They are creatively and sexually frustrated, subject to the caprices of men, machines, mortality, and other arbitrary powers.
  The opener, “Guidance / The Party,” is a diptych. The first section, told from the perspective of a woman, age 33, documents the arrival of The Guide, an angelic figure in heavy robes with illuminated skin and blindingly white teeth. Bursting into her apartment via a screened window overlooking the fire escape, The Guide informs the narrator that she has aged but not matured. The Guide (who is referred to always using plural pronouns like we and they) has come to prep the narrator for a party to mark the occasion of her transition into real adulthood. “You must send out invitations,” they explain. “Invitations are formal; guest show up having RSVP’d. People will most likely speak about articles they’ve read and restaurants they’ve been to. Regarding television, follow people’s cues so as not to let on how much television you actually watch. Avoid overtly solipsistic topics like childhood or family stories. Do not overshare.” The guide delivers the protagonist a thick manual, full of symbols she “cannot make sense of and lists of rules. Also, some questionnaires and a page of hygiene tips.” The story is formatted in much the same manner, with titled sections dedicated to subjects like Excuses, Friends/regret, Maintenance, and Stretches & such. Even as The Guide criticizes every aspect of the narrator’s life — and takes naps, and gets drunk — the narrator finds herself increasing attracted to The Guide, unsure of what she will do once The Guide departs.
  The second section covers the party itself. The perspective shifts to the third person: the narrator has become The Host, though the appellation seems an optimistic one meant to buttress the woman’s confidence. The Host has attempted to expunge her apartment of all trappings of immaturity, as per The Guide’s instructions. She has redecorated to suggest her own sophistication. She makes a 10,101-ingredient mole, which includes “liquefied frankincense and powdered rotten tooth that belonged to The Host, hand ground with a jade mortar and pestle.” As the guests show up (none of them actual friends, so as not to risk the presence of emotional baggage), The Host attempts to remain calm, though she frequently escapes to the kitchen to pretend to “check the oven.” The story is a catalog of the ways in which a person can feel inferior to her peers, never confident in how or why she is living the way she is, but certain that she’s doing it completely wrong.
  The other tales in the collection feature similarly vexing scenarios in which the protagonists are made to squirm before an unsympathetic universe. In “Take Care of Me Forever,” the hospital-bound narrator is diagnosed with increasingly unlikely disorders of the body and mind. With her impending death presumed, she is forced to sacrifice her dignity for the benefit of medical education and the art projects of her various physicians. In “Futures in Child Rearing,” a woman thinking about having a baby seeks answers from a prognostic ovulation machine only to receive responses such as “You will never be able to pay off your credit card debt” and “Get outside and/or a life.” In “Instruction,” which follows the students laboring at the Aqueduct racetrack, The Teacher’s growing obsession with Lee affects an entire generation of artists.
  In the wonderfully Gothic title story, the narrator comes to consciousness in a seaside town. She lives in a house with five roommates, and works at a newspaper office where she suspects she is being continually demoted (what begins as a desk job becomes more and more janitorial). She meets Tyler Burnett, the owner of the town’s chemical plant and scion of the local aristocracy, who is three decades her senior. Burnett lives in a house that is slowly falling into the sea with his artistic wife and his infant son. The son is a “forever baby,” who does not age. “It is a curse to have a forever baby,” Burnett tells the narrator. “The baby will never inherit my property, my good looks. I thought the point of having a baby was so you could age and die. You could be released after cursing someone else to this existence. With this baby sealed in infancy, I fear I may live a very, very long time.”
  The narrator soon becomes both Burnett’s lover and the infant’s babysitter, a web of relationships that causes her some confusion. “Tyler Burnett buys me a stuffed animal, a pony. ‘What will you name him, child?’ Tyler Burnett says. ‘Pony?’ I say. ‘Wonderful, child. Excellent. You’re a beautiful child.’ He gives me a bag of candy from the grocery store and pats me on the head. At times, I forget if we’re lovers or if he’s my father. He does not feel like a father.” The narrator must also contend with a stalker, a dying roommate, and a recurring bout of arson at her home. As in “Guidance / The Party,” she is constantly navigating the space between childhood and adulthood, weighing the expectations of men and society against her own instincts.
  This incongruity between the narrators and their respective worlds forms the collection’s throughline. One might expect the protagonists — each rational in her way — to crack under the complete irrationality of her circumstances. (After all, isn’t that how a normal person would respond?) But these characters do not crack. They check themselves. They adapt. They mold to the expectations of their environments. For this, as the reader realizes, is how things actually are: even when humans are confounded by the illogic that surrounds us, we rarely respond with logic. Instead, we become illogical, so as to meet the world on the same terms. Such is the way that individuals survive.
  coverThe collection remains faithful to the Dorothy aesthetic: books that are not only strange and inventive, but strange and inventive in ways that distinguish themselves from each other. Within that family, George’s surrealist comedies are perhaps most reminiscent of Joanna Ruocco’s endlessly digressive (and marvelous) novel, Dan, published by Dorothy in 2014. Broad comparisons to Aimee Bender and Alissa Nutting might also be made, but George’s motley presentation and aversion to explanation mark her as a truly distinctive voice. Her frank dystopias have the charming eccentricity of Edward Gorey illustrations. They do not rely on beauty or brutality or humanistic appeals to sell themselves. Just a vision and a ghoulish sense of humor.

• New Yorker
  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/last-girl-before-freeway-time-travel-the-angel-of-history-and-the-babysitter-at-rest
  Word count: 117

  THE BABYSITTER AT REST, by Jen George (Dorothy). This brilliantly caustic début collection of stories is an attack on the pieties of contemporary social life and the niceties of traditional fiction. In “Guidance/The Party,” a thirty-three-year-old woman is visited by the Guide, a spirit of indeterminate gender who has come to ease her transition into adulthood by giving brutally honest party-hosting advice. “Instruction” concerns an art school “located on the infield of the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, off-season,” at which the coursework consists largely of track maintenance and other manual labor, including the burial of dead racehorses. The author’s range of reference is frighteningly vast, and is played, always, for bitter laughs.

• Queen Mobs Tea House
  http://queenmobs.com/2016/11/22872/
  Word count: 992

  REVIEW: THE BABYSITTER AT REST

  21ST NOV 2016 IN REVIEWS

  BY CASSANDRA A. BAIM
  0 COMMENTS
  Reviewed: The Babysitter at Rest

  by Jen George

  Published by The Dorothy Project

  Last month, The Dorothy Project published the collection The Babysitter at Rest by debut author Jen George. The Dorothy Project, based out of St. Louis, Missouri, is a small press known for focusing on fiction by emerging female authors. George’s collection is divided into fie stories, each long enough and substantial enough to be a novella on their own. Each story reflects the growing anxieties of finding ones personhood and womanhood. Her collection is the latest in a genre referred to as “confessional literature,” or more recently titled “slut lit.” Confessional writing, popularized by writers such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath is often written in first person and reveals the writers’ deepest desires and motivations. Recently, emerging confessional works have been dubbed “slut lit” by the LA Review of Books. Rather than using this term to shame young female authors, it is used to identify writers who are “wise beyond their years and [who] know a thing or two about the price women pay for constantly pleasing others.” After devouring The Babysitter at Rest, I am moved to add Jen George to that growing list of writers.

  The eponymous story sets the tone for the entire collection. The nameless narrator, a young woman if indeterminate age (“I’m pretty sure I was supposed to have a birthday, but it has not come. It was supposed to be some time ago, but some time has passed and I definitely did not have a birthday,” she says), lives on a beach, works as an administrative assistant, and babysits an infant called a “forever baby,” meaning he will be a baby forever. She begins a sexual relationship with the baby’s father, who refers to her as “child.” This piece, like the ones that follow it, unfolds in a dreamlike state. She, as the narrator, is entirely unfazed by the oddities that surround her. She doesn’t question the baby, which Jen George uses to express anxieties about parenthood and aging. The other stories follow suit. The collection opens with “Guidance/The Party,” wherein the narrator (another nameless woman) finds herself under the direction of a corporeal entity known only as “The Guide,” who tries to usher her into adulthood y helping her in planning a party. This story in particular defines the struggle of becoming an adult—wanting so badly to grow up but not knowing what to do once you’re there. The most resonant story comes in the middle of the collection, “Take Care of Me Forever.” Its nameless and ageless narrator wakes up in a hospital, unsure of how she got there. Similar to the previous story, she has a sexual relationship with a much older, more domineering teacher figure. As she is wheeled through different wings of the hospital and given new diagnoses with corresponding treatments, the reader considers their own mortality. “Futures in Child Rearing” tackles fears about fertility and motherhood with an ovulation machine that acts as the narrator’s conscience, which is filled with self-doubt. The last piece, “Instructions,” bookends the collection nicely when considered in conjunction with the first piece. It follows the same structure as the stories that preceded it—full of non-sequiturs and a non-linear narrative. The narrator, along with her fellow students, follows the guidance of a Teacher as he instructs them through the milestones of young adulthood. For the first time, the narrator has a name, though she never refers to herself by it. By not giving her first-person narrators any names or identifying physical characteristics, Jen George forces the reader to become the narrator. We are placed in the stories—her anxieties are our own. It is incredibly easy to lose yourself in the five stories. Her prose is otherworldly and the plots surreal. But to everyone on the beach, or using the ovulation machine, or learning how to grow up, everything is entirely mundane. Finishing the collection is like waking up from a dream that moves swiftly from pleasant to nightmarish and back again, without realizing that you ever fell asleep.

  Short stories have the possibility of being far more personal than longer works of fiction. I often wonder why—perhaps because most Introduction to Fiction courses, where first-time writing students tend to be far more autobiographical in their writing, focus on the short story, or maybe because the writer has such a short space to tell their tale that they pack it with as much of themselves as possible. I gravitate toward short stories for their intimacy, and The Babysitter at Rest is as intimate as they come. I know nothing about Jen George besides her name—what she looks like, how old she is, where she grew up—but I know what she fears, and what she wants. George’s narrators make no fuss over their sexuality, relationships, or occupations. This is true confessional writing—unapologetic and rife with feeling. Though given few physical details, her characters are fleshed out in every other way. They represent the anxieties of growing up—motherhood, finding love, heartbreak, sexuality, and financial responsibility. The best art acts as a mirror to society, and in these anxious times it’s nice to know that not only are we not alone, but that we have the ability (and the right) to share those parts of ourselves in whatever art we see fit.

  Cassandra Baim grew up outside of Chicago and earned a BA in English from Syracuse University. She has previously been published on Medium and The Flexist. When she’s not selling books at New York’s most famous bookstore, she enjoys biking across the Brooklyn Bridge and teaching her cat to play fetch.

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2017/01/31/reviews/chelsea-hogue/the-babysitter-at-rest-jen-george/
  Word count: 2761

  January 31, 2017
  The Babysitter at Rest – Jen George

  by Chelsea Hogue

  jen-george-cover-front-245x299[Dorothy; 2016]

  My memory is mostly gone, though not entirely.

  —Jen George, The Babysitter at Rest

  When Jen George speaks of memory in “The Babysitter at Rest,” the title story in her debut collection, she establishes the mechanisms of episodic memory as broken tour guides for all five of these bizarre and deeply funny stories, as most reviewers seem to agree, although it’s possible that funny is, altogether, the wrong term, and it’s likely that this inadequacy comes from our not having a shorthand way to say funny in the same tender place where I feel indigestion, and funny through a low, dark seethe. We sometimes seem to not be properly equipped to separate what’s absurd (because it’s aggressively aware) from a joke — too often, they swap spots — and George’s sense of humor is most directly evidenced by the absurdity of her protagonists, who are women — more specifically, the aware sort:

  I was sexually attractive, which is highly valued in college and art circles, as well as other hierarchal scenes mimicking the structure of capitalism wherein older men with large hands finger younger women who read novels and possibly write or paint or play an instrument . . .

  Artists, attempting professionals, and students: George’s characters are all predicated on the images one may have on file of the modern adult woman, images that accrete over time, and in that process of building out memory, debris settles, images obscure, and the clearest way to re-see — to use this book’s logic—is to view the modern woman in abstraction.

  Reality is humor’s original source. We laugh in recognition or collusion. We laugh when we’re somehow written into the joke: we’ve seen the joke’s face or maybe those faces are ours. There’s an identification process. The joke relies on collective memory. It relies on those changeable rules which govern what’s in the fabric of acceptability. But regardless of the joke’s manifold constructions, across demographics and cultures, the majority of jokes do share at least one thing in common: their objective is to have you get it.

  Recently, my friend Laura and I accidentally began #XtremeWalking. Laura’s parents had new Fitbits and became avid step counters. Laura’s mother left their family in a line for theater tickets so she could circle the block once more; she wanted to beat Laura’s dad’s steps-per-day tally. Her parents become competitive: They march in place and excuse themselves for a lap around this or that building, this or that parking lot. Lying on Laura’s bed, laughing at the absurdity of a Fitbit, her parents felt so much like parents. The conversation was a joke; however, as the weekend and the joke continued, something shifted and we started walking and counting.

  Within the course of one day, a transition was made — joke to reality — the jump nearly imperceptible. We spent the better parts of our days walking between Manhattan and Brooklyn, sending screenshots of our walk maps. The joke isn’t linear. It circles: we make the joke; we get and remember the joke; we are the joke.

  In this collection’s first story, “Guidance/The Party,” a woman receives a genderless guru for her life, which will be tested in the cumulative action of one night of party-hosting. “‘Smile and look busy in conversation,’ The Guide says, giving an example of a pleasant smile. Their teeth are a blinding white; the brightness causes me to squint.” Divided into sections like “Excuses”; “Stretches & such”; “Wishful thinking,” this story is delivered as manual, which feels integral to the scattered logic, to its moving parts of character and situation. It’s prosaic enough, hosting a dinner, but it’s the George gesture to write this action as a shade or three off — aware of itself, herself — and this abstraction marks the space where we might find the circling joke.

  When I speak of the George gesture, I speak of her ability to make the ordinary ludicrous; the details of the host’s party read as material for an anxiety dream: there’s the challenge (a party), an audience to bear witness (humorless guests, mostly pregnant), and an insuperable obstacle (the need for recognition). Our host often wants to know if she’s doing it right, transitioning into a sufficient adult or relevant form of whatever her urban environment beckons.

  When I search for adulting on Twitter, so many agree with our host. They say it’s hard. Ugh, so much adulting. They have modest adulting successes — they clean their houses, wear suits, use day planners, and afterward they want to drink a lot or watch TV. Childhood punishments of abstention have become adulting goals. It would be cool if as soon as you say “adulting” you were blasted off into space from wherever you are. They are tired, they say. Our host is also increasingly harried, except these aren’t antics; this is what happens before an irrevocable break. This is an adulting attempt as salvation. What ails the host is as familiar as the concepts of loneliness and aging, but when she wears it, it’s horrifying and completely illogical that it should also happen here.

  ‘But I thought I could maintain certain things,’ I tell The Guide in a moment of naive trust and vulnerability. ‘Like the belief that my experience is leading somewhere? Except I didn’t know it was belief when I was young?’

  Here, and elsewhere, George employs the adulting list to dizzying effect:

  While The Guide sleeps, I clean the house; make 10,001-ingredient mole with seventy-two hour prep time (secret ingredients: smoked gold leaf and albino peacock talon paste); bake an eight-tiered cake; hand paint ceramic serving platters with Mexican-style floral design; wear a castor oil wrap; do squats; give myself an enema . . .

  The list can lull, confuse, exalt, or grate; however, George’s lists are pitiless. And it’s the sheer volume of impossible expectations that brings us to this story’s question: Can the host get inside of this modern woman model and live up to a line of gendered social expectations? The modern woman, I’m reminded, can do everything — art star career, babies, parties — and everyone, it seems, is willing to let her. And that’s sort of the gist in this collection: There is a pre-existing model and it’s yet to be determined what exactly the conditions of joining are, although we know well if we’re in or we’re out, and here’s the final kicker: if you don’t learn the unspoken rules, and you don’t master them on time, you likely never will.

  The Babysitter at Rest makes discrete shifts and turns through its protagonists, who seem to be unified by a particular art-school-brand of dialogue with the world: I Learn, I Act, I Create, The Aesthetic Class Responds. Repeat. While reading I often wondered if I was contending with the same character in each story. It seemed to be the same morass of the modern yearn for self actualization. Or could it be that we’re at least shaking the same weighted family tree?

  The tree, if interpreted liberally, could be closer to what is being built here: a five-story accretion toward some larger whole that I would describe as The Stirring Superficial. It may only be a small dinner party — the small parcel of inconsequential landscape that belongs to the feminine, according to gendered social expectations — but what’s at stake here is much more than a 10,001-ingredient mole. It’s the existential dilemma of attempting to bridge the irreconcilable desires of retaining what is vibrant while growing toward what is firm and complete, or adulting.

  The collection wants for a comparison because these stories do seem to have a postmodern lineage: ironic, vertiginous, a deconstruction of the highly codified social systems supporting art school ← → art world. The work has been compared to Kathy Acker, which I can agree with, but only on the condition that it’s qualified by noting the distinct differences between the two, the most notable of which is Distance. Where Acker knows no bounds, George uses restraint to distill an image, state of mind, a position of misgiving. Where In Memoriam to Identity can turn out a reader by its dislocation, The Babysitter at Rest is specific in its positioning.

  In the frenetic penultimate story, “Futures of Child Rearing,” a woman trying to get pregnant considers all of the ways this process could go horribly wrong, in addition to all of the ways she could possibly beat the system of inheritance. A notion which deludes many of us: We think we can, at any time, give only what is good, and that it is good that is mostly in us — but it isn’t true. This woman sticks her finger in an ovulation machine, which tells her: Transaction Declined. “I’d like to have a baby,” she tells us, “but I fear I’ll resent all the compliments he’d get.” She sticks quail eggs in her vagina; she visits a crystal store and spends six hundred dollars on a piece of star sapphire; she buys a drum of fish oil capsules. The position is clear: This protagonist wants an award for Best Baby, and somewhere in this world such an award must exist. And yet: “I put my hand in the ovulation machine: This is torture, it says on the screen.”

  While #XtremeWalking somewhere near South Williamsburg, I came upon two firemen shoving a thin metal rod into the door of an SUV. A woman puddled near their feet on the sidewalk was screaming, her hands covering her open mouth. Another older woman, huddled over her push cart, walked by me and said, “Shameful.”

  I asked if she knew what happened.

  “She locked the baby in the car.” Heat was radiating from the blacktop; we were all barely clothed.

  “Me? No crying,” she said. “I would’ve broken every window on that car. But look at her.” As if on cue, the woman wailed.

  “How do you lock a baby in a car? Get tough. Break the windows. Don’t sit there and cry.” She mumbled and kept walking. “How can you be so stupid?”

  It would be crass to say that adulting is defined by not locking your keys in your car when your baby is in it. Because adulting is ultimately a hashtagged joke, and hands-over-stricken-face — This is torture — is an image too clear.

  George takes us close to the absurdism of Donald Barthelme, but also the blurred distinctions between realism and science fiction that can be found in the work of Doris Lessing, a kinship found in spirit, not style, and is best defined by their senses of humor. In discussing her book, The Good Terrorist (about an impressionable woman named Alice who becomes a radical terrorist in London), Lessing surprisingly describes the work as humorous. “Well, it is comic, in a certain way,” she told The Paris Review. “We always talk about things as if they are happening in the way they’re supposed to happen, and everything is very efficient. In actual fact, one’s experience about anything at all is that it’s a complete balls-up. I mean everything!” To try again: Where Acker is concerned with the destruction of certain concepts and ideas, George is concerned with an act of de-creating our elaborate becoming rituals, the anti-bildungsroman one could say, and showing it for what it is: “balls-up,” as Lessing does with a character like Alice, who couldn’t eat anything that once walked, but doesn’t flinch at the idea of detonating a bomb to kill hundreds.

  In the story “The Babysitter at Rest,” this process of de-creation is most visible. We’re dropped into a place, a neighborhood or town, which could or could not be ours, or it’s a reality resting directly below our own: the abstracted reality. Once again, the narrator doesn’t have a name; instead, she has an occupation and a few simple desires. The babysitter, in this case, works in an office, where she ranks low, until she’s fired. She watches Tyler Burnett and his wife’s baby, painting in her spare time, “little things—ideas of a sunset, a bird—that I sell for ten to fifteen dollars apiece to people who also work jobs and live in houses, possibly with families. Here quality does not matter.” The Babysitter mechanically recounts the events of her life as they pass her. She does not know how old she is, and it’s not clear that she cares so long as she’s still somewhat young, so she continues to dress and behave like a young girl, which Tyler Burnett — of course, she’s fucking him — demands:

  “Child, please don’t pursue obscure aspirations of becoming something, though I know you wouldn’t know how to even if you wanted. It’d spoil you. You are better the way you are.” Tyler Burnett tells me before I leave for the night.

  His baby, whom she’s watching, will also not grow older. He’s been a baby for years and this is mostly treated as an everyday fact, but then there’s a moment of incisive clarity — as George often judiciously includes — where the observations of a character catalyze meaning for the reader. Tyler Burnett’s wife tells the babysitter:

  “The whole point is for your child to transcend what came before him with the benefit of your experience. But when you know there will be no adult form of the baby, it changes the relationship.”

  The soup of home, labor, and the rest can’t be separated in this space. Tyler Burnett buys her ice cream cones before pulling out his penis and saying, “Child, I would like you to suck my dick.” Or: “Child, I would like to titty-fuck you.” However, again, our protagonist shows that she’s, at least to some degree, in on this, too — is it ever a joke, or is it always a joke — after Tyler Burnett buys her a stuffed pony: “At times I forget if we’re lovers or if he’s my father. He does not feel like a father.” Roland Barthes used the term “reality effects” for the little moments of incident in the background or margins of a picture that bolster its truth value.

  The babysitter’s roommates accidentally kill another roommate by sealing her into the pool; “Lizzie Olsen shoots people with nail bullets from her wooden gun while her parents snort ketamine on the banquet table”; artists come to dinner at the Burnett’s and light the table on fire after throwing their plates off a cliff into the ocean.

  We’re in on the absurdity of this, and we could call it funny, a funny joke, but for that to be true, we have to make sure we’re listening to a joke in the first place, because not all absurd statements are meant to be humorous ones, and the way for a joke to exist is for everyone in the room to agree this is what’s being proffered. But then, perhaps, your room contains the dissenter, the voice that throws a speed bump into the joke: they interrupt, they’ve already heard this one, they don’t possess the cultural reference points to get the joke’s trajectory, they take the sarcasm too literally. They don’t think that one can get a crate or a barrel at Crate & Barrel. It requires several steps back in order to see the difference between what we learn from the world and what is innate, or to see an object anew, or maybe to see the hysterical heartbreak in the reality and joke being one in the same.

  Chelsea Hogue writes and teaches in Western Massachusetts. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The White Review, The Collagist, Quarterly West, and Autre Mag, among others.

• Numero Cinq
  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/11/14/will-not-crying-jags-review-babysitter-rest-jen-george-benjamin-woodard/
  Word count: 1824

  She Will Not Have Crying Jags | Review of Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest — Benjamin Woodard

  babysitter

  George understands that weirdness can only succeed if tethered to the familiar, and she exploits these common moments to load her stories with images that burrow into the reader’s brain. — Benjamin Woodard

  The Babysitter at Rest
  Jen George
  Dorothy, a publishing project, 2016
  168 pages, $16.00

  .

  Late every semester, as attention spans wane and final project deadlines loom, I treat my Composition students to a day of stress relief by cobbling together Exquisite Corpse stories as a class. I usually write the openings ahead of time and then pass them to one student, who adds his or her own lines, and then carefully folds the paper, accordion style, so that the next writer can only see the most recent sentence of the growing story. This continues until the pieces have circulated around the room and the pages look like tiny venetian blinds. Then I unfold the stories and read the results aloud. The students get a kick out of hearing me say some pretty bizarre things—once they realize I’m going to perform each story, they take it upon themselves to add in a naughty word or two—but what always impresses me is the coherence of these tales. Without seeing anything but a few words written by their tablemates, my students somehow create these Frankensteinish narratives that abide by perfect dream logic, where characters bounce from scene to scene, yet never lose sight of a singular goal. Ideas lost between students sometimes reappear five lines later, as if the air itself whispered a clue to a writer further down the table. The cheesiest way of describing these stories is to say they’re like catching lightning in a bottle, but there’s something true to employing that phrase. The room feels electric as my students and I realize the consistency that threads our crazy tales together, and that electricity vanishes the moment the class is over.

  Jen George’s wild, funny debut collection, The Babysitter at Rest, gives me that same electric jolt only the feeling doesn’t fade. Perhaps this is partially due to the form the volume’s five stories take, as they—like an Exquisite Corpse exercise—often contain dreamlike swerves. Yet there’s also a vivid realness at the core of each piece. George understands that weirdness can only succeed if tethered to the familiar, and she exploits these common moments to load her stories with images that burrow into the reader’s brain. For example, the following sequence, from “Take Care of Me Forever,” sees George’s protagonist, a sick woman waiting to die in a hospital bed, deciding to walk to the bathroom:

  “In the bathroom, I notice a large hole in the wall. An opening. I enter the opening with my mobile IV. I make my way through pipes, drywall, and rotten wood into what seems to be a strip mall dentist’s office hallway. All of the office doors are locked and the snack vending machine at the hallway’s end is empty.”

  From here, the character finds both a bucket of teeth and another passageway inside a janitor’s closet. The passageway leads her outside the hospital and into a football stadium, where a naked painter with a small penis sits on a stool at the fifty-yard line, surrounded by bookcases and a television. The characters know each other and talk about their past love affair—“The great love of my life with whom I wanted to have children left me because of the penis,” the painter admits—and the woman takes a look at the man’s artwork, conveniently displayed nearby, before returning to her hospital room. The progression, one of many found in “Take Care of Me Forever,” is surreal, certainly, and its non sequitur unraveling resembles a language game like Exquisite Corpse, but the unpredictability of the events here keeps the narrative consistently lively. A thousand questions flood the reader: Is this really happening? When were these two characters lovers? And, most importantly, what the hell is going to happen next? This liveliness creates curiosity, and it helps drive George’s stories, shuttling the reader into unique worlds where just about anything is possible. But within these worlds, characters confess their dark thoughts alongside jokes, and the author anchors her stories with just enough reality to never lose her audience.

  In addition, George peppers her collection with a brilliant series of inventories and lists that maintain audience interest while also setting rhythm. “Guidance / The Party” relies heavily on this technique while telling the two-part tale of a woman learning how to throw a party from a drunken “Guide” and then following through with its—The Guide is genderless—instruction. When learning how to present herself, The Guide rambles off a series of lists to the woman, including:

  “Wear makeup, jewelry, and something you cannot afford, in order to ensure you will not feel like a chubby street urchin halfway through the party. Refer to the manual for information on weight loss via dieting/cleansing prior to the party, taking saunas, eating cotton balls soaked in castor oil, ephedrine use, Epsom salt baths, and salt flushes.”

  Then, as she hosts her party, the woman is faced with the revelation that her female guests are pregnant, which results in the following passage regarding the pregnancy-adverse foods the host planned to serve:

  “All of the French cheeses are unpasteurized, then there’s the matter of the raw oyster bar, which was the second main spectacular food item, and also the raw egg, the mercury, the shaved mad-cow boar hoof, the tuna, the tonsil stone, and the lorazapam in the 10,101-ingredient mole.”

  The baby-related lists continue in “Futures in Child Rearing,” where a woman, hoping to get pregnant, states all of the traits she expects from her child:

  “She will look good in clothing and without. She will be adored but respected. She will follow a clear life path, free of too many obstructions, full of loving and successful friends who wear beautiful dresses, have lovely parties in the desert or at the beach, and who have about them an airy lightness. She’ll know how to go about getting what she wants. She will be capable. She will not have crying jags.”

  These lists and inventories are equal parts funny and peculiar. They establish a rhythm within the text, yet they also jolt the stories with a sudden burst of prose, adding a new layer of captivation to each story. Like the rambling, zigzag narrative paths already mentioned, George’s lists keep the text active, create charming juxtapositions, and root the reader to the page.

  In early press and reviews for The Babysitter at Rest, George’s writing has been compared to the playfulness of Donald Barthelme and Chris Kraus, but the collection’s title story, both in subject matter and structure, also brings to mind Robert Coover. Though George shies away from giving the story a metafictional shade, she does, like Coover, capitalize on the classic Penthouse Forum fantasy of an affair between a man and his child’s babysitter. Also like Coover, the relations between these characters are highly sexual and graphic, broken into short fragments, and it’s here that George ratchets the strangeness of her story to comment on gender inequality. The husband saunters through life wearing cool guy sunglasses, acting as a generic vessel of affluence and depravity, while the babysitter, who lives in a group home with a slew of degenerates, spends nearly all of the narrative prancing about in a bikini—she loses her other clothes—valued solely for her sexuality and youth. This exploration of primal and stereotypical instinct is frequently hilarious—more than once, the babysitter says she’s, “Seventeen. But I might be anywhere from seventeen to twenty-two,” a clever quip commenting on men’s justification of the well-worn fantasy of the sexy schoolgirl—but it also provides the collection with a universal thread of female exploitation, which comes up again and again. “Take Care of Me Forever” contains a sexual relationship between the dying hospital patient and her doctor, as well as a crudely worded help wanted ad that seeks applicants willing to “listen to problems and musings of (all male) staff,” be “flirtatious with all,” and who must “not have boyfriend,” and hopefully live with “cute roommates A+.” And in “Instruction,” the collection’s final story, a young female pupil becomes both the star student and sexual plaything of her professor, known as “The Teacher/older man with large hands.” In his conquest, he feigns interest in her ideas (“‘Welp, cool idea. Really neat.’ He succeeds in stifling laughter.”) to get in her pants, and the explicit results draw the ire of the student’s peers.

  What is Jen George trying to say by including so many examples of older man/younger woman exploitation in her collection? It’s easy to argue that the answer is up to the reader, but the author offers up several hints as to her potential mission. The student artist in “Instruction” eventually breaks away from her instructor and wanders the country, sparking artist revolutions and turning “The Teacher/older man with large hands” into a lost soul, who eventually begs the student to explain to him why she abandoned their relationship. Meanwhile, “The Babysitter at Rest” sees the title character, after all of her adventures, holding her charge, a “forever baby” who will never age, in her arms and deciding that he is fortunate to never grow up into his father’s good looks or fortune, that remaining a baby is far more advantageous. If he never grows up, he can never become a predator.

  In a way, these two women gain an upper hand in their situations, and while their moments of clarity may be short-lived, this evolution speaks volumes. And maybe this is what George wants her readers to notice. Then again, perhaps the ultimate goal for The Babysitter at Rest is to provoke the reader into considering the ways we all use one another to our own advantage. In any case, the collection is a wonderful experiment, full of electric twists that linger.

  — Benjamin Woodard

  .

  Woodard

  Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in Hobart, Corium Magazine, and Storychord. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his criticism and nonfiction has been featured in The Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Electric Literature, and other fine publications. He also helps run Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com and on Twitter.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/06/this-week-in-short-fiction-90/
  Word count: 735

  THIS WEEK IN SHORT FICTION
  BY CLAIRE BURGESS
  June 10th, 2016

  In a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single, childless, career-less, 33-year-old woman who is visited by a mysterious Guide. The Guide has been sent to whip her into adulthood before it’s too late.

  “I was assigned to your case. You’re now 33,” The Guide says . . . “Though you’re visibly aging, you’ve failed to transition properly and now it’s the last hour.”

  The Guide has ethereal robes and skin that glows from the inside, but they (gender unclear) aren’t the fairy godmother type. They’re more the emotionless, taskmaster, unmerciful-truths type. The type who says things like:

  We find you at the point of early decay. Decay sets in with the loss of possibility, not having children, having children, a string of failures over the years, memories, jobs, aging, falling out of shape, losing your looks, realizing you’re a one-trick pony or a fraud or nothing special, and understanding things too late.

  The Guide throws out the woman’s old journals (“For your future sense of self-worth”), bags up her age-inappropriate clothing, shows her stretches, and directs her to buy body-shaping undergarments. The Guide tells her that she must throw an adult party to mark her new adulthood and gives her hostessing tips like avoiding salt before the event and preparing a conversation list of future plans, because “it is always better to say you’re doing something rather than nothing.” George is both witty and cutting with the character of The Guide, who is a wonderful and terrifying invention, part Ghost of Christmas Future, part metaphor for self-flagellation, and part embodiment of women’s magazines, Pinterest, and the current zeitgeist of successful female adulting in human form:

  Take up yoga, pilates, or zumba. Wear a sauna suit at all times when not in public. Make a lot of money to buy expensive beauty treatments and more sauna suits, preferably in a creative career that is high-paying, smart-dressing, and jet-setting. Once you’re wealthy enough a sparse diet will become second nature. The act of radiating positivity should take the place of the natural vibrancy of youth.

  George isn’t only concerned with the cultural white noise of detox tea and at-home enemas, or performing femininity by hand-painting your own dishware and cooking insanely complicated appetizers. She also addresses other pivotal adult qualifiers: parenthood, marriage, and career, or the lack of them. With a mix of satire and pathos, George captures that horrible moment that can happen in your thirties—or earlier, or later, or over and over again—when you reflect on your life choices and wonder if you should have chosen differently.

  Q: Was there a particular point at which I should have done something different: gone to school for something specific, made professional advances, interned, taken a risk or leap of faith, asked for help, called people back, shown gratitude, applied for a job with a salary and benefits, saved money, gotten insurance, built a community, resigned myself to a relationship with someone for financial stability, had a baby?

  A: Probably.

  With “Guidance/The Party,” Jen George skewers the damaging cultural imagery of acceptable female adultness and asks what exactly an “adult” actually is, while also capturing the very real and human sense of crisis, self-doubt, and disappointment that can come with fading youth and waning possibility. George’s debut collection of short stories, The Babysitter at Rest, is forthcoming from Dorothy, a publishing project, in October. With stories like “Guidance/The Party” included, it should be a read to look forward to.

  Claire Burgess’s short fiction has appeared in Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, and PANK online, among others. Her stories have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prize and Best American anthologies, but haven’t actually made it into one yet. She’s a graduate of the Vanderbilt University MFA program, where she co-founded Nashville Review. She lives in Pittsburgh by way of the deep South and says things on Twitter @Clairabou_. More from this author →

• Electric Lit
  https://electricliterature.com/sleeping-through-alarms-74db3ac05e82
  Word count: 989

  Sleeping through Alarms
  Jen George’s debut collection is at once exciting, absurd, and inconsolably honest

  Well-written characters, the wisdom goes, must make hard decisions and face the consequences of their decisions. They are agents of their own destinies. The characters in Jen George’s debut collection of stories, The Babysitter at Rest, were not written with this wisdom in mind. George’s protagonists are experts in passivity: they are doubters, weepers, the blamers and blamed, they who sleep through alarms. Taken together, they form a picture of contemporary life that is at once exciting, absurd, depressing, and inconsolably honest.
  The collection’s first story, “The Guide / Party,” begins with a sexless, long-haired guide breaking through the narrator’s apartment window. The Guide is there to train the narrator how to be an adult. The narrator is clingy and desperate for The Guide’s attention, whereas The Guide treats the narrator with bureaucratic indifference. When the narrator tries to “justify [her] delayed adulthood” by listing terrible things that have happened to her, The Guide responds “The listed defenses for your incompetence are universal conditions, not individual, and as such do not excuse you from anything.” Here, George undermines how we normally think about character. Precise details do not individualize the narrator. They generalize her, and even make the Guide “hate [her] somewhat.”
  “Does greatness meaning growing up? Does it require forgetting childhood traumas? Becoming rich?”
  Through The Guide’s insistent demands and the narrator’s expressions of authentic loneliness, readers feel the unrealistic expectations forced onto young people, especially young women, who are consistently told to “make a lot of money to buy expensive beauty treatments” or to “radiate positive,” even as their lives fall apart. The question at the heart of this story — and much of the collection — is how to be great. Does greatness meaning growing up? Does it require forgetting childhood traumas? Becoming rich? And, most importantly, what must be sacrificed to become great in society’s eyes?
  In the collection’s title story, a cartoonish example of greatness comes via Tyler Burnett, a wealthy philanderer who wears dark sunglasses and who is somewhere “between [the age] forty-seven and fifty-two.” The narrator, a woman between seventeen and twenty-one, babysits Tyler Burnett’s “forever baby,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and quickly becomes his mistress. Tyler Burnett is glitz without substance, things without meaning. When he first meets the narrator he says, “Chemicals and fishing, the water. Yes, television. Art, no. A walk. To Swim. Jokes and such are not my kind. Sexy and rubs are my sort of thing. With you, something distracting.”
  Like The Guide, Tyler Burnett makes excessive demands, though his are mostly sexual. His requests are so straightforward they’re at once funny, completely unsexy, and routinely disturbing. He buys the narrator gifts, like ice cream and ponies, and calls her child. About him, the narrator admits:
  “At times I forget if we’re lovers or if he’s my father.”
  Away from her lover, the narrator works a dead-end job where she is repeatedly demoted. At home, her roommates seem to always be throwing parties. Parties reappear throughout George’s work: they give her the liberty to write about people in extreme states. Her prose, in these scenes, moves with a witty, frantic energy that is both addictive and insouciantly violent. “Lizzie Olsen shoots people with nail bullets from her wooden gun while her parents snort ketamine on the banquet table. . . . Tyler Burnett shows up high on ketamine and we screw under the bed in my room.” This party ends with a friend buried alive in a pool sealed shut with bricks. Though George’s stories often slide toward nihilism — “Is this it?” we might ask, “Is life just empty sex and drinking?” — the absurd energy of her prose and subjects charges the writing with carnivalesque joy. Life, for all its violence and pain, still deserves to be written about.
  “Her prose […] moves with a witty, frantic energy that is both addictive and insouciantly violent.”
  In the collection’s final story, “Instruction,” George most directly grapples with greatness. The story takes place at an elite art school where the artists bury racehorses and are constantly disparaged by a large-handed Teacher. George uses sections and subtitles to move quickly through student gripes, their projects, conversations, and excerpts from the Teacher’s memoir. The narrator — an art student — and Teacher have an affair, but unlike in earlier stories, she resists the crippling influence of the egomaniacal patriarch. She even leaves school to move upstate with her contemporaries. “There were a lot of paintings of pastoral scenes and writing in the form of diary entries about nature or chores produced during that time, most of which are now considered garbage, the period being referred to in the art world as ‘The Garbage Years.’”
  The narrator becomes one of the most prolific artists of “The Garbage Years,” an unfortunate legacy, she admits. Her achievement is equally distinguished and worthless. At the end of the story, she visits her dying Teacher. “You could have been great,” he tells her. “There are other things,” she responds, a phrase that speaks for characters throughout the collection.

  Chasing greatness spurs doubt, self-hatred, and pain — especially when the conditions for greatness are determined by the sort of egotistical men that reappear throughout George’s collection. Despite its criticisms of greatness — or perhaps because of them — The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of stories. George’s writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal, seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable.
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  Alex McElroy
  Fiction writer | Fiction Editor Gulf Coast Mag | Writing in Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, New England Review, The Offing, & others.

• Harvard Review
  http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/?q=features/book-review/babysitter-rest
  Word count: 978

  THE BABYSITTER AT REST
  by Jen George
  reviewed by Jennifer Kurdyla
  February 28, 2017
  We meet the first narrator, one of several loosely interchangeable female voices, of Jen George’s deliciously subversive collection of linked stories when she’s thirty-three years old. The age Jesus Christ was when He was crucified; the age when, according to some, one comes fully into adulthood and gains a sense of one’s identity. But this young woman is far from having anything you might call an “identity”; rather, a Guide has been hired to train her to become an adult, proclaiming, “We find you at the point of early decay. Decay sets in with the loss of possibility, not having children, having children, a string of failures over years, memories, jobs, aging, becoming out-of-shape, losing your looks, realizing you’re a one-trick pony or fraud or nothing special, and understanding things too late.”

  At least Jesus knew He was going on to greater things.

  Despite this disarmingly fatalistic setup of the real-life condition of the entire generation of young women living today presented at its outset, The Babysitter at Rest does ultimately redeem itself with its unconventional style and inventiveness. George’s voice deftly shifts between her women’s points of view and different narrative modes, all of which ooze deadpan sarcasm and wit such that you can’t help but laugh. The fact that the reader is laughing as much at the characters as she is at herself adds a layer of keen self-awareness to the book that, like Shelia Heti’s novel-from-life How Should a Person Be?, puts it in the camp of recent fiction that connivingly blurs the line between imagination and truth. As even the title and jacket art provocatively suggest, this multifaceted portrait of the young woman today is a still life of sorts, asking whoever picks it up to examine characters ostensibly failing at life and see those failures reflected back at her. Am I a cliché of my own ambitions and naiveté? it asks of its reader. Is there a way to transcend the mold I’ve been put into, first as a girl, and now maybe as an almost-woman?

  In recent years, contemporary fiction has seen a tremendous rise of the so-called “girl book”—novels that not only have the diminutive word in their titles, but that question the very meaning of modern femininity in this way largely through disturbed and troubled main characters, characters who fall on a spectrum of psychotic from murderous (Gone Girl, Girl on the Train) to cultish (The Girls). What sets The Babysitter at Rest apart from these is its more nuanced and subtle distortion through which the women are portrayed. They are familiar, selves we may have been once in the past or could see ourselves being in the future: a grown woman who literally needs a manual to figure out how to be a functioning adult; a too-old babysitter whose affair with her employer renders her more of the charge than the baby she’s ostensibly watching; another woman trying to have a baby; one dying in a hospital; and one barely making ends meet in a pathetic day job. George shifts their circumstances so that, as if enhanced by an Instagram filter, none of them is quite like we have actually seen or experienced: there’s of course no manual to life (though we sometimes want one); the baby being babysat will never age, placing its sitter's temporary youth and attractiveness in sharp relief; and the medical wards depicted are hubs of futuristic torture. There’s a sense of slight relief when we see the sadism of some of the sexual encounters, for pleasure or for procreation, or what it’s like starting a “career” at a warehouse: I’m not quite there, I’m not that bad.

  And yet, George is able to slyly probe the reader’s own sense of what being "there" means through her unfiltered prose. The questions we don’t ask, and things we don’t acknowledge in life, are presented here with unremitting honesty, laughable because they’re off-kilter and because they’re not:

  I’ve always been afraid of not getting what I want … I’ve always wanted to be all things to all people … If I am honest with myself, there was always a limit to my potential … If I am honest with myself, I don’t know what I did with all or any of my days. If I am honest with myself, it is a relief. Angel food cake is my favorite food. Nothing was as good as I’d wanted it to be.

  These thoughts, from the vignette “Take Care of Me Forever,” epitomize the book’s main concerns about how women routinely, through cultural indoctrination or expectation, fail to truly understand themselves until, like the woman lying on her deathbed in this story, they face a moment of crisis. What form that crisis takes is to be determined, but it’s an unwavering fact in these pages that the crisis is here and now—one that has very serious echoes in reality.

  As a writer in today’s world of ceaseless self-promotion, Jen George herself remains something of an enigma. This is her debut novel, and her work has appeared sparingly in online magazines. Taking this mystery into account, The Babysitter at Rest feels even more urgently wise; it’s a writer’s message to readers that by removing ourselves from the melee of twenty-first-century life, we can see it more accurately. And once we achieve that separation, it can be all the more enlightening, and enjoyable, to view ourselves in a funhouse-style reflection, full of the unsightly bulges and scars that make us human.