In recent novels set in restaurants, the breakneck speed of the action hides darker elements at work. Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher follows a restaurant worker whose life threatens to unravel amid his gambling addiction; in Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back, the world of waitressing is a front for Texas’s grimy underbelly. Beneath the surface frenzy of French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock (translated by Jordan Stump), there is a similar stream of existential angst, its protagonist “mired in the heart of pointlessness”.
Baglin’s focus is intergenerational exploitation in the (French) workplace. She gives an impressionistic portrait of a young woman employed at a burger joint in brisk but unsparing prose, alternating between her unnamed narrator’s customer-facing drudgery – unfriendly co-workers, pestering managers, habitual injuries – and her childhood memories, particularly of her hot-tempered father, Jérôme, who toiled in a factory for 20 years.
Structured around the eatery’s different stations, the novel starts “Out Front”, stops by “Deep Fat” and winds up at the “Drive-Thru”, inducting the reader into the inner workings of each. But around that simple scaffolding, Baglin’s novel is deliberately disorienting. Passages detailing how to “mash the trash” segue into the narrator’s recollections of her hoarder father filling his front room with stuff and “immersed in the pile of junk” at a dumpster.
It can all get a bit confusing. Although mostly narrated in the first person, Baglin also makes discombobulating leaps into the mind of Jérôme. Events and timelines are hazy, as if told from a fragmented child’s viewpoint (“It might be afternoon, another year”). Simmering tensions stay inexplicit, her parents’ fraught conversations a “secret murmur”. We are left to merely guess at her father’s fraying mental health and financial woes, while the political backdrop to his troubles is glimpsed only in a childhood game referring to the recession and the neighbour’s downstairs parrot squawking “Sarkozy sucks” on demand.
The cutthroat culinary environment of the narrator’s present day is described in Kafkaesque terms (a machine buzzes “like a giant insect”) and as a full-blown war zone with “shrapnel” flying. Uniformed anonymity gives cover, the narrator becoming willing to trample on others, “to take their place” in the pecking order. Baglin expertly captures the giddiness of the working day, her writing percussive: “Snap, snap, you get that?” “Thanks, medium fries! … shake shake shake.”
On the Clock has a rhythm that takes getting used to and I did find Baglin’s digressions strayed too much from the propulsive kitchen-set story. But the novel is underscored by a lacerating humour, even in its bleakest passages, and offers a refreshingly uncompromising study of working-class life, with its calluses, oil burns and hypocrisies laid bare. The result is a terse, bracing whirlwind of a book.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin (translated by Jordan Stump) is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
