Claire Baglin’s On the Clock (Translated from the French by Jordan Stump) Daunt Books, 159pp, £9.99)
It wouldn’t even cover a shift. Claire Baglin’s On the Clock, translated by Jordan Stump, runs to just 159 pages. I read it in a single sitting, devoured it like a discounted combo meal, only to realise afterwards that it sat heavy in my gut. The prose is spare, clipped, and precise, like the kitchen itself. And like the kitchen, it begins to blur—between one order and the next, between one summer and another, between a child’s view of the world and the rituals of adult submission. It’s a book about working for minimum wage in a French fast-food restaurant, but that description barely gets at it. There are no names for the place, no logos. Yet we know exactly where we are. The fryer sizzles, the sauce sticks, the headset crackles. The light on the punch clock flashes a chirpy “hello” when you scan in. It says nothing when you leave.
Shifts and Summers
The narrative is structured as a diptych. In one half, we follow a young woman through her first weeks of fast-food labour: the humiliating job interview, the haphazard training, the fluorescent routine of trays, bins, hairnets, and blistered thumbs. In the other, she’s a child again, on holiday with her family, her father a factory worker, her mother exhausted, her younger brother Nico still full of chaos and questions. The chapters alternate without fanfare, without temporal markers. The job invades the childhood, the childhood haunts the job. The book’s genius lies in refusing to make this juxtaposition feel unusual. In Baglin’s world, work begins before you are old enough to work. You already know how to wait, how to apologise, how to mop up the spill someone else caused.
For a novel so rooted in the collective experience of labour, On the Clock contains remarkably few characters. The story orbits a small, tightly drawn constellation: the narrator, her younger brother Nico, their exhausted but steady mother (unnamed, if I’m not mistaken), and their father Jérôme. There’s Chouchou—the front-room manager with a pristine blonde bun and manic grip on authority—and later a Paul, one of the few men who appears outside of a supervisory role. Apart from him, male characters are either customers or invisible. Women carry the everyday. The crew behind the tills, in the locker room, at the sinks, almost all female. There’s a passing comment that you only get your name on a locker door once you’ve lasted long enough, and that those remembered are women who either endured or combusted spectacularly. Even precarity has a gendered memory.
The book also makes clear what’s particular to French factory labour, especially in the father’s world: the presence of the comité d’entreprise, the works council, which provides not just vouchers but subsidised electronics, Christmas catalogues, fishing trips, and farewell parties. It is a shadow welfare state, corporate in origin but social in function, and the only thing tethering the family to a sense of dignity. The holidays, with their rigid rituals and €450 vouchers, are part of this economy. So is the father’s portable DVD player, “from the workers’ council,” now playing dubbed action films to numb the evenings. But these gifts don’t offset the toll. When Jérôme comes home from work, he washes his hands, removes his safety boots, and lowers himself into the same spot on the sofa “where the foam has made a hollow for him.” He fits it too well. The domestic becomes shaped by labour, even at rest. The sofa doesn’t offer relief; it bears witness.
Ghosts of Work
Despite the forensic attention to detail, the sweat collecting under the polycotton cap, the skin peeling from hands that have spent too long in chemical cleaners, the ‘standing broom’ technique for lobby cleaning, the coded language of “manas” (managers) and “grids” (rotas), On the Clock is almost ahistorical. It could be set at any time in the last twenty years. There are touchscreen tills, portable DVD players, and crew members checking their phones on breaks, but nothing that firmly pins the novel to a particular year. Except, absurdly, a parrot. The neighbour’s pet occasionally squawks “Sarkozy sucks!” through the walls. Without it, we’d have no real way of knowing when we are. But then, perhaps that’s the point. The work Baglin describes is not peculiar to one moment or one government. It’s permanent. It’s now.
The holidays, when they arrive, are not respite but ritual. The family uses chèques-vacances, a real French scheme of subsidised holiday vouchers intended to make leisure affordable for low-income workers. In the book, they are passed around with wonder, €450 of possibility, but their use brings nothing but stress. The parents fret over where they’re accepted, whether to spend them on restaurants or attractions. The children dream of fast food; the parents circle menus, argue over prix fixes, mutter about vinaigrette and steak. At one point the father imagines the failure to use them properly as a kind of familial catastrophe: “the children in tears, his wife saying what’s your problem Jérôme, you could have asked earlier.” These moments, which should mark a break from work, instead reproduce its logic. You have to make the most of your holiday. You have to spend wisely. You can’t be late, or lazy, or wrong. Leisure becomes a performance of middle-class ease, one that exhausts everyone involved.
Baglin’s prose—translated with eerie clarity by Stump—refuses lyricism. This is not a novel of uplift. There’s no dramatic rupture, no blaze of refusal. The narrator doesn’t walk out or burn her uniform. She stays. She scans in. She apologises when customers shout. “I only know ten or so words,” she says at one point. “The ones I’ve been using for the past four hours.” Even language is reduced to function. The job becomes her vocabulary. Resistance is muted, buried, illegible. What we get instead is witness: the flat testimony of a body on shift.
Still, something flickers. The restaurant is haunted, less by ghosts than by residues. In the locker room, the metal doors are still labelled with the names of women who worked there before, “revered for the day when she poked a hole through the bottom of the ice cream bucket, when she insulted a customer, when she spilled a whole bag of caramel sauce on her pants.” You don’t get a locker right away. You have to prove you’ll last. Until then, your belongings live on borrowed space. The new girls, we’re told, “have to prove themselves before they get their name on a locker door.” This is precarity written into architecture. The building remembers. The workplace may try to sanitise itself, but the smell of old oil and panic never quite goes away.
Inheritance
The novel is full of scenes that stick. Nico vomits off a merry-go-round. He pleads for a balloon he was never given. The narrator, now a teenager, loses an earring at a treetop adventure course. Her father, already half-broken by factory work, insists on searching the forest floor, combing every metre beneath the ropes and platforms, long after it becomes clear the earring is gone. He keeps looking until the park closes and they are forced to leave. “It’s not about the money,” the mother says, but we know it is—not the value of the earring itself, but what it would mean to replace it, to let it go. His refusal to stop is both touching and painful: an effort to protect his daughter from the indignity of loss, but also a kind of masculine reckoning, a man who fixes things refusing to admit that some things can’t be repaired. Later, the mother disinfects the girl’s ear in the campsite wash hut, cracking head lice in the sink with her fingernails. These aren’t symbols. They’re symptoms. Baglin doesn’t write metaphor. She writes material life. Pain isn’t a symbol of alienation, it’s a workplace injury. Time doesn’t stand still, it gets eaten.
One of the novel’s quieter threads follows the father’s strange attachment to broken consumer goods. Some days, he brings things home from the factory skip—“a hoover, a console, a computer”—and justifies it by saying, “You’ve got to get something out of working there,” pointing at the bin as if it were a final, sarcastic bonus scheme. Other times, it’s more furtive. The whole family is in the car. They pull over near an anonymous dumpster. The father lifts the lid, starts pulling things out while the rest of them stay inside, silent, still. “As if by not moving, we might disappear.” The narrator calls it a raid. Both acts, routine salvage and quiet looting, speak to a desire to reclaim value from the waste stream, but they carry different emotional charges: the former embedded in workplace repetition, the latter tinged with embarrassment, even fear.
At first, it seems like resistance, a working-class refusal of planned obsolescence. But nothing is ever truly fixed. The garage fills. The pile grows. He bandages his fingers, breaks nails, cuts his palms. “As if the brokenness had to pass from the object to his body before it can disappear.” The few items he does manage to repair are powered with batteries salvaged from the robots he assembles at work, an almost allegorical image of production looping back into domestic maintenance, only to fail again. Is this hoarding? Possibly. The mother calls it hereditary, and blames Jérôme’s mother, whose flat is also full of unusable things.
The narrator, as a child, senses this tendency and resists. In one scene, after her parents retreat behind their bedroom door, she moves quietly through the apartment, collecting all her things: her shoes, her notebooks, her bracelets, her test papers. She wants to prove that not everything is a mess. She inventories her possessions like someone trying to catalogue a future. “If one single belonging escapes,” she thinks, “how can I see the inventory through to the end?” It’s an act of control, of symbolic order, a child’s attempt to break what she fears might be an inherited pattern. But the clutter keeps returning. Waste, in Baglin’s world, is not what gets thrown away. It’s what stays.
And then the novel ends, not with resolution, but with routine. The narrator is back in the car, riding home. Her head bounces against the window. Her younger brother feigns sleep to be carried indoors. The fast-food toy she was given on a previous shift has lost its glow. There is no revelation, no escape. Just the hum of the road, the quiet tension in her parents’ front seats, the knowledge that tomorrow will look much the same. The punch clock will flash hello, and the headset will ask once more if the customer wants pineapple slices, even though the restaurant doesn’t sell them.
I loved this little book. Its scale is modest, its sentences spare, but it leaves a mark. Jordan Stump should be commended for bringing what is a very French novel—steeped in the particulars of factory work, holiday vouchers, and domestic shame—into English with such quiet clarity. Baglin captures something brittle and brutal about work, inheritance, and the failure of rest. She will be a writer to watch. And while very different in voice and tone, she can already sit alongside Édouard Louis as part of a generation chronicling the afterlife of class in contemporary France—not with theory or polemic, but with scenes that get under the skin.
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