On the Clock

Claire Baglin’s On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator’s summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory with an upside-down smile. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and sharp ear for workplace jargon, her dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin’s depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. Working the alternating strands in a way reminiscent of Georges Perec’s W or the The Memory of Childhood, the past is remarkably vivid in On the Clock: her childhood memories of their bleak small town and of summer vacations spent at campgrounds by the sea in Brittany. And the present blazes in scenes of the young woman’s current fast-food trial: the awful boss, the nasty manager, and all the tedium and horror of dead-end work:

Slowly the oven door opens and a nursery-school tune announces that the salad rolls can come out [and] I’m mired in the heart of pointlessness. I stick a straw into the whipped cream but don’t take off the end of the paper wrapper so they’ll know it hasn’t been used, I’m conscientious.

"A striking and necessary novel, precise and luminously simple." -- Les inrockuptibles
"A remarkably surefooted first novel, written without anger, but with a slight ironic distance that makes of her telling of the potato-frying process a passage worthy of inclusion in French literary anthologies." -- Le Monde
"With En Salle, twenty-two-year-old Claire Baglin joins the ranks of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, [and] Alain Robbe-Grillet as an author at Éditions de Minuit. By means of a family story, En Salle explores examples of laborious alienation. Baglin deftly uses empathy, humour and a distanced perspective to share the effects and affect both of the narrator’s temporary job and of her father’s years on a shop floor.  Baglin’s novel contrasts two mentally and physically damaging workplaces characterised by frenzied behaviour, malfunctioning machinery and clothing regulations… It’s not clear, by the end of En Salle, whether the cycle of exploitation has been broken or not. But a hoard of memories has certainly been deployed to great effect." -- Ruth Cruikshank - TLS
"What makes En salle is its rhythm, its precision, its muted anger, its humor, and its rigor: a pitiless attention, carried along on language." -- Libération
""Superb and astonishing"" -- Michael Magee
""A mesmerizing novel about the cleaning rituals at a fast food restaurant."" -- Dayna Tortorici - N+1
""This debut novel, translated from the original French by Jordan Stump, playfully explores social inequity through the lens of one family’s relationship to work. The narrator, a 20-year-old in search of a summer gig, is hired for a fast-food position after a particularly grueling interview. She alternates recounting the minutiae of the job — “frozen rectangle” fires, boiling oil, repetition — and memories featuring her electrician father, a graceless and unfortunate country man whom she both loves and is ashamed of. On the Clock is a visceral depiction of manual labor, alienation, and family in rural France."" -- Jasmine Vojdani - Vulture
"I raced through this extraordinary novel about ordinary life… It's stylish and sparse and brilliant on inequality and alienation. This small book packs a big punch." -- Sara Lawrence - The Daily Mail
"One of the paciest and most gripping pieces of prose I’ve encountered in a while – and a lesson to us all." -- Lucy Scholes - The Telegraph
"On the Clock is no literary “junk food”... In fact, this tiny tome packs quite the wollop, providing sly social commentary though its wry account of one not unintelligent young person’s entry into the machinery of capitalism." -- Scout Magazine
"On the Clock gives a new level of detail to the realities of blue-collar labor. By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore." -- Rhian Sasseen - The Atlantic
"Baglin's assured debut is both an inventory of the impersonal world of fast food and a personal narrative of a working-class life.... Like treated beef, Baglin's novel is a lean, finely textured thing. In Jordan Stump's translation from the French, the novel captures the little triumphs, stinging humiliations, and physical toll of labor." -- Walker Rutter-Bowman - The Baffler

Claire Baglin was born in 1998 in Normandy, where her father labored in a factory and her mother was a social worker. On the Clock is her first book. Jordan Stump is the noted translator of several modern French novelists, including novel prize winner Claude Simon, for whom his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes won the French American Foundation’s Translation Prize.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.