Royale with Squeeze
A French novel about fast food, labor, having a dad, and... generational shifts in how we understand our life trajectories?
“Proust had the madeleine; Baglin has fryer grease and fluorescent lights.”
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When we meet Claire—the protagonist of the French writer Claire Baglin’s slim debut novel, On The Clock—it’s 2020 and she’s a 20-year-old college student interviewing for a summer job at a fast-food joint. After she gets hired, we watch her pilgrim’s progress through the restaurant: cleaning the dining room, taking orders, making fries. The shifts are boring when it’s slow, draining when there’s a rush on, and essentially interchangeable, the only variety coming from the occasional injury, machine breakdown, or particularly rude customer. New employees come aboard. Old employees leave. The action never adds up to anything you’d go out of your way to call a plot.
Fortunately, Baglin lards the restaurant scenes with plenty of other pleasures. She has a keen sense not just for the literal work of fast-food—the disposal of the used-up grease; the refilling of the ice cream dispenser—but also for these restaurants’ distinct psychosocial atmospheres. Often, when we’re out to eat, part of what we’re buying is the relaxing experience of having the rest of the world temporarily cordoned off for a bit. At fast-food restaurants, though, life usually refuses to wait outside. Baglin knows all about it:
A dad dumps a bunch of centimes into my cupped hands. On the surveillance screen, a traffic jam. A motorcycle honks, a driver gets out and grabs hold of the motorcyclist. A man walks past with a piece of cardboard that says he’s hungry, customers close their windows on his fingers. In my headset, lane two, I hear a woman yelling into a phone for fuck’s sake the least you can do is show up for a date, Jonathan! If you can’t understand that, shut up shut up, you said that before so just shut up, I don’t want to hear it, no you listen to me, because last time you said, no, but you said you were ready, I can’t believe this, just stop! A baby is crying in the back seat. I finish counting the change and the dad bends towards me.
—Sorry, that’s from the kids’ piggybank.
On The Clock also nails the dynamic, instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked fast food, where a customer’s sheepishness (or even shame) about what they find themselves doing—trying, for example, to order a greasy, unhealthy sandwich, perhaps one with a cartoonish name (e.g. Wendy’s “Baconator”)—finds expression in a mix of performative ignorance and scorn for the employee trying to serve them.
—I’d like a bacon.
—I’m sorry I didn’t quite hear you, can you repeat that?
—A bacon thing, you know, I’m not sure what you call it, bacon something.
—I’m sorry, could you say that again?
—I said a bacon.
—I beg your pardon, I’m new here and I don’t know everything. I’m pretty sure we don’t have any burgers with just bacon, what is it exactly you want?
—Listen, you’re the one who works here honey, you know the sandwiches better than I do.
Intercut with Claire’s fast-food summer, we get scenes from her small-town, working-class childhood. The preoccupation with labor is still front and center but filtered through the perspective of a child who has never herself been an employee (though also, of course, through perspective of the adult author who has). Claire’s father, Jerome, a kindhearted but easily overwhelmed factory maintenance worker, is always either at work, tired from work, or trying—with mixed success—to untether himself from work and money stress long enough to enjoy a family vacation or weekend outing. He’s a poignant character, marked by contradictions in a way that feels fully human. “You’ve got to have hobbies, passions, things you can do on the weekend, and you can’t let yourself get sucked in, otherwise that’s it,” Jerome tells young Claire, but we sense he’s really—or also—talking to himself.
The coming-of-age sections have an implicit trajectory, one that’s long been common to narratives of working-class life. In a word: escape. Claire’s parents want her to have more options than they themselves had, and they do what they can to help her get them. Because she has some writing ambitions, they get her a computer she can type stories on. (Jerome scavenges it from a junk pile and fixes it up himself—unsuccessfully, it turns out, but the gesture remains). They take her to career day at the local library, making sure she’s learning about all the options that lie ahead if she applies herself. And, perhaps most significantly, they eventually send her to a boarding school that will prepare her for university.
The fast-food scenes are a pleasantly fine-grained portrait of a contemporary working environment that doesn’t get a lot of literary attention; they also constantly risk recreating the repetitious boredom they attempt to evoke. The childhood scenes, by contrast, shimmer with the heat of family life and coming-of-age. Fortunately, Baglin jumps between the two timelines frequently and fluidly, stopping the boredom from taking over and creating a pleasant sense that we’re surfing the waves of Claire’s memory, stumbling along the way onto the currents that connect her and Jerome across time as laborers. (Proust had the madeleine; Baglin has fryer grease and fluorescent lights.)
The more the book progresses, the more the richness of the childhood sections draws our attention to the narrow aperture of the 2020 material. We learn all about 20-year-old Claire’s time in the fast-food restaurant, but almost nothing else about her life. What does she do when she’s not working? Where does she live? We never see her have a conversation of any substance with a coworker—does she have friends? Baglin studiously avoids answering any of these questions; the narrative lines set in motion in the childhood scenes vanish, in the fast food scenes, from the surface of the text. Claire has made it to university, that classic way station of class mobility, but what has she been studying there? How does she imagine her future? What do her parents think about her life, including her fast-food work? Is she even in touch with them? Again: nothing. Claire’s parents’ absence from these sections of the text is so complete that I briefly found myself wondering if they were possibly dead, and if the blinkered narration was meant to be a kind of textual embodiment of her grief.
Squinting, I could sense the possible point of an argument being made about alienation in the modern workplace, à la Severance. I didn’t quite buy it, though. To be alienated, in any meaningful sense, is to be alienated from something. We don’t know enough about 20-year-old Claire to know what her '“something” is. If Baglin’s purpose is to suggest that Claire’s job is wiping her life away, the novel sometimes feels a bit too eager to play along.
And yet, the longer I sat with the novel, the more sympathetic I became to its approach. Here, I confess, I might be expressing my bias as a millennial forced to grapple with the decimation of at least two of the professional sectors—journalism and the humanities academy—that I once thought would help give me a home in the world. Claire has made it to university, but where will university take her? Perhaps not where her parents told her it would, and perhaps not to a place unambiguously “better” than their own lives.
On The Clock is, make no mistake, absolutely clear-eyed about the difficulties of Jerome’s job and the life it gives him: there is no missing that his work is dangerous, hard, and poorly paid. We also can’t help but notice that Claire’s fast-food job is in many ways appreciably worse. Jerome is in a union that subsidizes the family’s vacations; he has work friends; at work, he feels needed for his particular skills, which he’s able to take pride in. Claire, by contrast, is an interchangeable cog in the fast-food machine, operating with no guarantees, and living—we can infer from the book’s loud silences—out a long-term plan that might no longer apply to a shifting world. Sometimes, there’s nothing as alienating as the place where an old story used to be, and it’s this alienation—as much as or more than the alienation of the workplace itself—that might be Baglin’s true quarry.
It’s possible, yes, to imagine a book that tackles this alienation more explicitly—that has something more direct to say about it, or that shows us more of the arc of Claire’s life. But the staying power of On The Clock is in how powerfully it evokes this particular alienation without ever mentioning it directly: it’s just there, baked into the book’s architecture. We reach for Claire’s life beyond fast food and don’t find it—perhaps this is how she feels, too.
Toward the end of the summer, Claire’s manager gives her a perfect evaluation and offers her a promotion. She, too, can be a manager. Claire is supposed to sign her evaluation—to endorse its version of how she’s spent her summer—but before she can, the paper “slips to the ground and lands in the pooled water.” And that’s it. Fin. It’s possible to imagine Claire walking out that day, never to return. (“You can’t get sucked in,” we can hear her father whispering in her ear.) It’s possible to imagine her asking for the evaluation to be reprinted so she can sign it. But Baglin doesn’t tell us what happens. Claire doesn’t know what’s coming next. Neither do we.✹
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Wonderful review, Peter.