On The Clock – Claire Baglin

[New Directions; 2025]

Tr. from the French by Jordan Stump

 “A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose.” This behavior is, according to Adam Smith, who makes this observation towards the beginning of An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a “deficiency.” The “habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application…must always reduce considerably the quantity of work which he is capable of performing.” However, even this evangelizer of the “division of labour” has to concede that sauntering is also “natural,” something that is “necessarily acquired by every country workman.” As his fellow Scot Robert Lewis Stevenson would later write in The Silverado Squatters, an 1884 travelogue of his honeymoon in Napa Valley, “The people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood.” Turns out a clever bit of economic reasoning was not enough to uproot this most humane approach towards one’s work.  

Or at least that is how things may have stood at the end of the nineteenth century. A handy indicator of alienation in today’s workplace, from the factory floor to the hill and valley of wine country, is the almost total eradication of sauntering. At one point in Claire Baglin’s On the Clock, Jérôme, a skilled electrician in a factory, is having a little “lark about with his co-workers” when he is summoned across the factory floor to repair a machine. After a long walk in which “the regular rhythm of the machines seems to keep time with his footfalls” (i.e., decidedly not a saunter) he is informed that the machine works fine, it just needs a new screw, and Jérôme asks why his comrade didn’t call the supply team ten meters away.  “Don’t ask me,” replies the worker, “they told me to call maintenance.” This slight brought about by the complete absence of care follows Jérôme home, and his daughter can hear his complaint as he unwinds the day with his wife in their bedroom. “I can put up with a lot,” he says, “but all this back and forth, you can’t imagine. They push you to the edge, physically. But all the same I’m never mean, you really have to push me to make me turn mean.”

There is a lot of back and forth in On the Clock (En Salle), published in 2022 by the legendary Éditions de Minuit (publisher of Beckett, Duras, Robbe-Grillet) when its author Claire Baglin was just twenty-four years old. The novel was quickly praised as a powerful account of alienation, twenty-first-century style, and now we have it in English thanks to the prolific translator Jordan Stump, who has translated Eric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Marie NDiaye, and other luminaries of contemporary Francophone literature. The novel alternates between the unnamed narrator’s experience taking a summer job at a McDonalds’-like fast food restaurant and remembrances of a childhood profoundly shaped by her father’s working life at the factory. Over the course of the book, both workers are pushed to the edge in various ways, but there is not some sort of heroic refusal or turn to meanness that would explode the narrative beyond the tightly bound limits of the workplace and the family—say to a polemical condemnation of the class structure of society. Rather, Baglin catalogues those small psychological adjustments that are as important to learn as Point-of-Sale technology or managerial abbreviations if one wants to stay afloat in the modern workplace.

This novel has quite a bit to say about the contemporary nature of work and the class structure of which it reflects. The alternating narratives bring us very far away from the ’68 problem of students and workers not being able to unite in their refusal of the status quo and vision of a better future. The future is in fact radically foreclosed on both narrative tracks in On the Clock—we know that Jérôme’s punishing schedule is not redeemed in an easier working life and enlarged set of life prospects for his daughter. Baglin brings astounding detail to the rhythms of a working-class job in the service economy, but also strips earlier iterations of working-class life of any romantic projections.

So what of life on the modern shop floor? Well, the warm memories of the fast-food chain that the narrator brings up in her rather humiliating job interview quickly disappear. This is not a summer job where you make friends, bonded in shared contempt for bosses and customers and enjoying the luxurious, slacken pace of meaningless work. The workplace quickly descends into something vaguely terroristic, subject to the random whims of her immediate manager Chouchou, who keeps things moving at a breakneck pace. “That’s the trick” the narrator says about Chouchou, “she never talks to anyone, she never looks at anyone. Chouchou is a sort of automaton that pops out every day for its routine.” The narrator quickly learns to locate little spaces of refuge, like putting rubbish under the masher, where dangerous things requiring silence and concentration eliminate the possibility of micromanagement. Though these, too, will be colonized by the relentless speed of the job. “One day Chouchou asked a co-worker if she wouldn’t mind mashing the rubbish and the co-worker answered no not at all, and she added, I like doing that.” The narrator glimpses “a flash of suspicion I’d never seen before in Chouchou’s eyes,” and watches her follow the co-worker into the rubbish room to make sure she wasn’t using her phone.

And what of life on the more traditional factory shop floor? The track focusing on Jérôme only takes place a decade or so in the past, but the differences in the way work shapes identity couldn’t be clearer. There is very little “larking about” at the restaurant, and the flatness in which that work is described makes identification with the job absurd. Take for example the narrator’s reflections from her rubbish room refuge:

Whenever I go into the rubbish room I’m struck by the silence. Out front, everything happens against a background of beeping fryers, online orders, the drinks machine asking for milk, for fruit. Everyone’s constantly talking, the manas ask us about our doings past, present and future. They assign missions, issue challenges, explain the best way to do this and that. We all tell each other what we’re doing, what we’re yet to do, we talk to customers, here you are, go from table to table, how our loyalty programme works, it’s very simple. In the rubbish room my ears ring, but it’s a relief.

Things stand differently for Jérôme, who identifies quite strongly with his job, though this identification is shot through with uneasiness. It is just a fact of his life, something that he must wrestle with, and it serves as a stable pole around which family life can take shape. Yes, he sometimes works days and sometimes works nights, but the irregularity of his schedule functions quite differently from that of the narrator, for whom irregularity means learning which station she is put at each day and therefore which strategies are needed to stay afloat.

There is a great deal of joy and tenderness that Baglin brings to family life, but that is not going to spill over into the workplace. Jérôme returns from work one day to find a letter informing him that he will receive a médaille du travail for extended service, for which there is a little banquet, and he wavers between pride and the more sober recognition that this is an empty gesture from the company. “He wonders why nobody told him, why in the past few hours they didn’t simply give him the letter in person.” The narrator, on the other hand, is given her recognition in person. “Chouchou asks me to join her at a table in the dining room. An evaluation sheet is lying in front of her, she starts to explain the various points she’s grading me on. I stay standing, a cloth in my hand, I go on wiping a tray no matter how she tries to get me to put it down.” She gets a 20 out of 20, the prospect of advancement is raised, but the narrator betrays no emotion whatsoever. How could she, given what we have observed in the preceding pages? This is not an arc which concludes a story line, but another thing that happens in the more or less random, increasingly annoying sequence of things that constitute her working life. This is what makes “On the Clock” such a canny English title, shifting the spatial logic of En Salle (“indoors”) for a relentlessly temporal one.

On the Clock is an excellent novel for this moment when we’ve moved through Smith’s division of labor to some other phase. It is not just our physical habit of “sauntering” that has been de-natured, but also our interior lives that slot complex emotional reactions to things happening around us. The work is exhausting for both the narrator and her father, with a serious possibility for injury in both cases, but the response to each is something of a grand shrug. A shrug, like a saunter, is however a very natural and humane gesture, which maybe unburdens your mind for a moment to take a little pleasure in an otherwise exhausting life. Like when Jérôme interrupts a squabble between mother and daughter by holding up an index finger to his ear:

– Shh. Listen. Don’t you hear it?

– Hear what?

– The downstairs neighbors’ parrot.

– Oh yeah? What, is he whistling?

– No, listen, he’s not whistling.

– What the?

– It’s fucking hilarious.

– What?

– Listen…he’s going to say it again.

– What?

– Sarkozy sucks.

Michael Schapira is an Interviews Editor at Full Stop.