Claire Baglin’s assured debut novel presents an affecting portrait of an ordinary, working-class French family — without the shock factor of Édouard Louis’ excoriating account of his homophobic patriarch in Who Killed My Father or the emotional profundity of Annie Ernaux’s oeuvre. Here, inspired by her own experience of a punishing summer job, Baglin deploys the daily indignities of the workplace to illustrate a life ground down by poverty.
Claire, the 20-year-old narrator, endures a soul-destroying stint in a fast-food restaurant that relentlessly churns out burgers and fries, saccharine ice cream and sodas. Her shifts are interwoven with scenes from her childhood. Her father Jérôme, an electrician in a car parts factory, takes pride in his work and is chuffed to win the médaille du travail. Claire recalls the perennial worry about money, her father’s hoarding and his insistence on mending anything he can salvage from the dump. Family excursions and a camping holiday are wonderfully evocative — we can almost smell the “sweat and saliva . . . noontime crisps and ham-and-butter sandwich” in the car.
Published in French as En salle (“indoors”) in 2023, when Baglin was just 22, the novel is fluidly translated by Jordan Stump. On the Clock is divided into four parts, named after the steps Claire takes from “Interview” to the treasured position of serving in the “Drive-Thru”. At each station she is scrutinised by her trainers and fellow crew; while cooking fries, “they’re watching over my work, from the way I hold the scoop to the movements of the baskets, I have to keep it moving.” One manager, Chouchou, makes her presence felt to the extent that Claire feels “We’re working in Chouchou’s sitting room.”
In direct, unadorned prose, Baglin conveys the stultifying boredom of Claire’s routine, the passive aggressive boss, the unsympathetic managers and the lack of skill involved: “No one cooks here, what we do is guarantee a high temperature, a suitable appearance, conforming to what the customer already knows or might have tasted in another outlet of the chain . . . our moves are the same as the moves crewmembers made twenty years ago.”
We swiftly realise that Claire, “mired in the heart of pointlessness”, is caught in a similar repetitive work cycle to Jérôme but with none of the pride he had felt. At least Jéjé, as he is affectionately known, bonds with his colleagues. Claire makes no friends in the restaurant — there is no time to find allies and she keeps a distance: “I’m the crewmember who never participates in anything, never joins anything, never eats with anyone.” At times, under stress, she loses the ability to speak in coherent sentences: “I don’t know how to talk any more . . . I say some more words, I only know ten or so, the ones I’ve been using for the past four hours.” Both father and daughter are injured at work — she is badly burnt by hot chip oil, he is electrocuted while repairing a robot — and they know there is no chance of recompense. Worse, Jérôme worries that he will lose his job for not having followed safety procedures.
Baglin seamlessly segues these alternating narratives, contrasting and finding parallels in the father-daughter experiences, and exploring the subtle markers of wealth with wry humour. When Claire visits her boyfriend’s home, she notes that his family’s mailbox is adorned with their name: “the letters are printed in a special font, not written on a scrap of paper.” She dismisses their occasional clutter as “fake . . . a fibbing clutter”, compared with her home where “real clutter is coated with dust and bits of fluff”, where “clutter is climbing the walls”.
On the Clock is a compact, unexpectedly rich exploration of ordinary lives, ruled by the punch clock, and Baglin encapsulates how quickly alienation and a sense of powerlessness take hold when mindless work robs a person of their self-respect.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated by Jordan Stump, Daunt Books £9.99, 176 pages
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