The idioms of a language—its jokes, expressions, and well-worn wordplay—are windows into its speakers’ values and points of view. In both French and English, certain phrases—métro, boulot, dodo (“commute, work, sleep”), for instance, or nose to the grindstone—reflect a shared assumption about labor: that work is drudgery, eating up time and hindering happiness. Fiction, meanwhile, can upturn such collective attitudes by conveying the specificity of actual working lives and workplaces, recognizing that even the most monotonous labor can shape the self. It can also reveal contrasts in how different cultures think about the ways people make a living.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a wave of books preoccupied with our working lives, many of them focused on white-collar office jobs. Novels such as Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary have taken an acidic view of the American office, with all its inane rituals and acts of time wasting, often using deadpan humor as a means of critique. (One exception is Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted, which follows the lives of employees at a big-box store in upstate New York.) Even more nonfiction on the subject has been published, notably David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which examines the rise of what he sees as meaningless, administrative office work.
The French approach the subject differently, at least to judge by the recent output of books translated into English and released to critical acclaim. Many of them are set among and told from the perspectives of the French working classes, focusing on blue-collar labor rather than office work. Most are memoirs or autofictional titles. Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father, published in the U.S. in 2019, takes an impassioned, often angry look at what he sees as the French government’s neglect of the working class in the form of a letter addressed to his father. (As Louis told The Guardian in a 2017 interview, “Who speaks for these people whose lives are shattered, who are humiliated by the system?”)
In 2013, the sociologist Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims approached the same subject via a delicate self-examination of the author’s shame over his working-class origins. Returning to Reims frequently references the work of Annie Ernaux, the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature, whose recollections of her childhood and the lives of her grocer parents have been published in books such as A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story. And in 2023, the novel Standing Heavy, by the Ivorian French writer GauZ’, a look at the lives of undocumented immigrants working as security guards in Paris, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
A recent entry into this genre is Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock, translated into English by Jordan Stump, which gives a new level of detail to the realities of blue-collar labor. Divided into four sections—“The Interview,” “Out Front,” “Deep Fat,” and “Drive-Thru”—this scant, 100-page volume follows a nameless university student from a working-class background as she spends her summer break working at a fast-food restaurant. On the Clock does not shy away from the particular indignities of this type of job. Interspersed with present-day scenes are flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood, with special attention paid toward her kind and hapless father, a factory worker. His occupation and social status have always been tied to his sense of self, his understanding of who he is: “When my father talks about his last job … he never goes into detail,” the narrator thinks to herself early on, noting how the company one works for or the location of a workplace can immediately reveal one’s class. “That’s all it takes to name what you have to get away from.”
What the narrator has to get away from is the assortment of low-grade humiliations and condescending attitudes she is confronted with every day while clocked in at the restaurant. She is bothered by the barrage of customer requests, all of the orders blurring into one. The patrons’ tastes are of utmost importance to the restaurant and, in turn, its workers, whose daily lives are shaped by these desires. “I don’t know how to talk anymore,” the narrator thinks during one particularly difficult exchange with a customer whose payment doesn’t go through. Such demands don’t acknowledge the narrator as a person; rather, she is simply a means to an end, a machine programmed to fulfill the customer’s every desire.
The narrator’s job doesn’t just rob her of her ability to speak; it also makes her time into a commodity, one that can be used and exploited by others, from the first job interview onward: “He wants to know who I am and what I’m prepared to do for the sake of being on time,” she recalls of her initial interactions with her future manager. After she is hired, she quickly grows resentful of the restaurant’s byzantine scheduling system. As soon as she crosses the threshold from the outside world into her workplace—“I punch in the code, chime, I open the door”—she knows that for the next few hours, her time is not her own.
In an essay last year on the French “sociological memoir,” Ann Larson and Alissa Quart offered a theory for the contrast between French and American literature about work. They posited that it could be attributed to the prevalence of rugged individualism in American society, a bootstrapping mythos that positions white-collar labor as the ultimate goal of workers everywhere. Novels such as Severance and Temporary seem to reflect a certain disillusionment with that myth, the realization that numerous steady office jobs come with, if not backbreaking work, a feeling of existential malaise. Books like those by Louis and Ernaux, conversely, avoid this trap, Larson and Quart argue. Instead, these titles engage in what the philosopher Chantal Jaquet calls a “class defector” narrative, in which the author is critical of not only the middle-class world they ascend into but also the working-class milieu they come from, which they see growing more and more culturally conservative. In this view, the writer is an alienated figure, trapped between these two worlds; the position they occupy grants them the distance to recognize the drudgery, but also the humanity, in both kinds of work.
The central concern of On the Clock is narrower than the preoccupations of its French predecessors. The narrator’s critique focuses on how the restaurant pits her colleagues against one another, rather than a wider-scale look at France’s class politics. Baglin emphasizes the subjectivity of her narrator, describing her workplace in as much detail as American novels set in office buildings. Seen through the narrator’s eyes, the fast-food restaurant’s employees lose their generic anonymity and gain a sense of individuality. By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore.
The post A Novel That Takes Mundane Work Seriously appeared first on The Atlantic.
