On the Clock, the first novel by the French writer Claire Baglin, consists of vignettes that switch between two narrative threads. One is about a summer job the narrator, Claire, takes on at a fast-food chain, whose name is never revealed. These scenes follow her as she cycles through the franchise’s different stations—the dining area, drive-thru, fries, the café—and are characterized by a minute attention to the tasks each one involves, as well as the mores of the “crewmembers” and the jockeying among them.
The other strand of On the Clock looks back to Claire’s childhood. She lives in a small town in an apartment with her parents, Jérôme and Sylvie, and her brother, Nico. It’s piled up with flotsam that Jérôme, who seems to be a hoarder, has purloined from dumpsters and tries to repurpose; their shame over their living conditions and lack of money pushes them into isolation from other people. Jérôme is often the focus of these sections of the book, which deal with his relationship to his job at a car part factory in a way that mirrors the ones about Claire and the restaurant. He’s mistreated and falls victim to the cavalier safety protocols there, but he still takes a kind of wounded pride in what he does (making a point of driving his family past the building he works in, for instance, or crowing about what ends up being a sad dinner honoring his service); outside that context, he’s plagued by self-doubt and feelings of powerlessness. It’s suggested that Claire is poised to leave these circumstances behind: she goes to boarding school, cultivates an interest in writing, and seems to be attending a university when she gets the job at the restaurant.
In France On the Clock was put out by Éditions de Minuit, a big publisher in the postwar European avant-garde. Its first titles to attract notice were Samuel Beckett’s work after his turn to writing in French, but it became famous during the 1950s as the imprint most responsible for the “nouveau roman,” a capacious term encompassing writers like Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, and above all Alain Robbe-Grillet. Steven Spalding, in his book Minuit, says that in its heyday the publisher held out “the promise of a newly realist mode of writing that would strip literature of old fashioned philosophical, political, and ideological constraints. The public roles of theorist and architect of Minuit’s new novel were both played primarily by Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Besides his novels, Robbe-Grillet wrote polemics attacking the fiction of the day and espousing the nouveau roman style, and according to Spalding, he acted as a reader for the press and helped shape its bent.
In his essays, Robbe-Grillet set the nouveau roman against the politically engaged “literature of commitment” then promulgated by figures on the left like Sartre. He dismissed this work and proclaimed that “art cannot be reduced to the status of means in the service of a cause which transcends it . . . whatever his attachment to his party or to generous ideas, the moment of creation can only bring [the artist] back to the problems of his art, and to them alone.” This conviction led him to explicitly call for a return to art for art’s sake, but stripped of any humanist content. To Robbe-Grillet story was the product of the outmoded idea of a “stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe,” and character had no place in the novel now that individuals had been superseded by “administrative numbers”; he said that “the exclusive cult of the ‘human’ has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric.” The nouveau roman would undo the distortions of literary form and even of human consciousness itself. Material objects, which Robbe-Grillet’s novels spend pages and pages describing, would no longer be reduced to symbols, fit within explanatory theories (Marxist, psychoanalytic, etc.), or imbued with any other subjective associations; instead, “in this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own ‘meaning.’” In practice, this approach resulted in passages like this one, from Robbe-Grillet’s novel The Voyeur:
He realized he was looking at the hardware shopwindow from behind. He noticed on the left a round, long-handled enameled iron skimmer like the one sticking out of the mud, the same shade of blue, scarcely any newer. Looking more closely, he discovered that a sizable chip of the enamel had flaked off, leaving a fan-shaped black mark fringed with concentric lines that faded out toward the edge. To the right, a dozen identical little knives—mounted on a cardboard strip, like watches—formed a circle, all pointing toward a tiny design in the center which must have been the manufacturer’s trademark. Their blades were about four inches long, quite thick but tapering a sharp cutting edge much slenderer than those of ordinary knives; they were more like triangular stilettos, with a single honed edge.
On the Clock seems to transplant this sort of late modernist style from the airy realm of the nouveau roman to the world of low-wage labor. Its achievement is both to puncture its depoliticized formalism by applying it to the problem of making a living and to stay true to its spirit of defamiliarization by refusing the frameworks typically used to understand work. To start with, like Robbe-Grillet’s writing, On the Clock mostly eschews psychologizing in favor of attention to the surfaces of the fast-food experience. Sometimes this takes the form of carefully recorded details like sauce sticking to plastic trays, or the texture of nuggets. But Baglin’s main interest is the routinized movements that make up work in these chains. An early scene where Claire takes drive-thru orders is characteristic:
The problem with working the drive-thru is the screen I’m facing, where I’m supposed to enter the order. Rectangular boxes, you have to push with your index finger, what do I click on, where are the desserts, how do I leave off an ingredient, add a sauce, a free one, don’t charge for sauce, and why do they always want a croque-monsieur with no ham? I’m hunched over the screen, my finger goes back and forth in the air whenever someone says something in my earpiece. I want a burger in a combo meal. My finger moves, but where is it, I’ve lost the burger and I don’t know how to cancel the ice cubes, replace the ice cream with a different ice cream and no syrup. The kid in the car tells his mother, uh no not diet Coke, regular Coke, and I have to start over.
Unless you count the line about the croque-monsieur, Claire’s emotions don’t bear on this scene at all. Instead, the focus is on the movements of her finger along a digital interface. They aren’t presented in the service of some idea of Claire’s character or adduced for any sociological theory of work. All Baglin is interested in is the movements themselves, apart from what they might be made to mean or how they make people feel. The way she shows them breaks our habits of perception: these gestures, which in many service sector transactions pass unnoticed by customers and are performed unconsciously by staff, are magnified to a degree where they can be observed with uncanny granularity.
When emotions do surface, they most often take the form of repressed anger exploding at inopportune moments. Claire sometimes indulges in resentful fantasies: while working the fry cooker, she says, “The customers who send back their fries because they’re not hot enough, I long to plunge their hands into the boiling oil.” In a scene recounting a childhood vacation, Jérôme, harried after driving around trying to find a restaurant cheap enough for the family to afford, yells at Sylvie when she tells him he missed a turn. Customers sneer at cashiers over short delays.
This atmosphere of barely suppressed frustration carries over to the scenes between the fast-food workers, which are some of the most remarkable in the book. Baglin avoids homilies about working class solidarity; she doesn’t heroize her characters or present them as incipient agents of social change. In putting aside these frameworks, she deals with work not as it could be in our political aspirations but as it actually is in the present run of things: pointless drudgery interspersed with passive aggressive slights and stupid pissing contests, which makes anyone who has to do it brittle and mistrustful. Later in the novel, Claire lands a shift preparing drive-thru orders for the handoff through the window, a plum job among the crewmembers. But it only makes her a target for her co-workers, who make a show of undermining her to boost their position in the eyes of the managers: “I fend off all the others, a crewmember starts to unfold a bag for an order and I rip it from her hands, I snap excuse me the way you’d bark fuck off. While I’m getting my bag back, some other cow puts the lid on my drinks, I want to shove her into the sauce boxes, I tell her I can handle this you know.”
The clipped style in this scene is typical of On the Clock. Baglin stays away from lyrical or conventionally “literary” writing. This was true of the nouveau roman too. Declaiming that “it is the entire literary language that must change,” Robbe-Grillet called for writers to drop the pretense that there was some noumenon or wellspring of passion they could draw out behind the world of appearances; they should stick to delineating the surfaces of things instead. Baglin’s prose is just as anti-expressive as Robbe-Grillet’s “geometric” style, but she achieves this effect through an even more provocatively unliterary idiom: managerial verbiage (Jordan Stump’s excellent translation has a good ear for this). The first few pages of On the Clock, which show Claire’s interview for the job at the restaurant, are exemplary on this front. She tries “to come up with a synonym for multi-tasking and I can’t find one. I can’t very well say versatility” and knows that the interviewer is “expecting me to talk about the honor of joining a team, about an interest in, about a talent for.” This kind of talk is just phatic; it has no content and reveals nothing about the people who engage in it, and in this way it resembles the sort of intentionally depthless writing Robbe-Grillet advocated for.
This rings true of many other exchanges in the novel. Stock phraseology also propels the interactions between staff and customers. At one point Claire reels off the litany of questions that push these transactions along: “Hello I’m ready to take your order, and what else can I get you? would you like me to put the burgers on screen? would you like anything on it?” Problems arise when something happens that falls outside this script. In another scene she hands a card reader to a customer while working the drive-thru window; it plummets to the ground, and she has to go look for a manager, only to find that “I don’t know how to talk anymore. . . . When I find her I say some more words, I only know ten or so, the ones I’ve been using for the past four hours.” The novel’s reliance on these inert utterances creates a distancing effect. They are always the same and could just as easily be said by one crewmember as another, and as a result the characters’ interior lives come off as opaque.
Taken together, the book’s parts amount to a bleakly cyclical vision of working class life. Claire describes what it’s like to work in the restaurant’s kitchen station:
No one cooks here, what we do is guarantee a high temperature, a suitable appearance, conforming to what the customer already knows or might have tasted in another outlet of the chain. We operate food-production equipment, and our moves are the same moves crewmembers made twenty years ago.
This sense of regimented gestures repeated in perpetuity over a range of interchangeable spaces, which extend themselves over the surface of the earth as more and more franchises are added, is characteristic of the novel. In On the Clock fast food chains seem infinite, particularly in their demand for labor. Over and over again it shows masses of nameless workers coming and going as they change shifts; on Claire’s first day, her boss hands the group he’s training “plastic-wrapped uniforms, many times dirtied by crewmembers before us.” The novel is also sensitive to how this pool of labor is created in the first place. In the parts about Claire’s upbringing, it seems as though her and her brother are being molded to take on jobs like the ones their parents have. They play pretend as a cashier talking to a customer; Claire poses for family photos wearing her father’s coveralls; Nico says, “When I grow up I want to do what daddy does.” Hanging over moments like these is a feeling of the inexorability of a class reproducing itself. Spalding’s book on Minuit includes an anecdote about a questionnaire Pierre Bourdieu (himself a Minuit author) circulated to buyers of Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Maison de Rendez-Vous in 1965. It found that the people who liked it most were “students, writers, and teachers,” though some in “management and liberal professions” responded favorably too. By contrast, Baglin, according to an interview with the French newspaper L’Humanité, did stints working in fast food and was as of 2022 selling sofas in a furniture store. This shift tracks the decline of the university as an economic backstop to literary production: in the nouveau roman days Minuit’s publishing strategy leaned on course adoption, as other presses of its kind did. Many lament this change, but On the Clock shows its possibilities. At its worst the nouveau roman style tended toward arid formalism; Baglin’s use of it brings it down from its lofty remove from worldly concerns and lets her get around conventional ways of thinking about work. The result is a service sector avant-gardism that seems likely to gain in relevance as the institutions that sustained writers fall apart and more of them are pushed into such work.
Jim Henderson
Jim Henderson’s writing has appeared in Strange Matters, Review 31, 3:AM Magazine, and Minor Literature[s].