On The Clock

A marvelous debut from the hugely talented young French writer Claire Baglin, this tender and painful portrait of working-class life finds shards of poetry inside the twin hardships of poverty and service work

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.

Paperback. 144 pages.

About the Author

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.