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Small Fry

Claire Baglin’s novel of family and low-wage work A McDonald’s worker in Spokane, Washington, ca. 1980s. | Flickr

On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. New Directions, 144 pages. 2025.

In the world of mass-produced food, “pink slime” plays a crucial role. Coined by a former meat inspector and USDA microbiologist named Gerald Zirnstein, the term refers to beef trimmings melted into a paste and treated with ammonium hydroxide. “It’s pink. It’s pasty. And it’s slimy looking,” said Zirnstein, explaining his thinking. The technical term for pink slime—which, in raw form, resembles strawberry soft serve—is lean, finely textured beef, also known as LFTB; for years, McDonald’s, among many other high-volume purveyors of beef, used it as filler in hamburger meat. In 2011, in response to a storm of media coverage and public concern over pink slime, McDonald’s USA announced that it had stopped using the substance. “We wanted to be consistent with our global beef supply chain,” the company cryptically explained. Meat-industry leaders were quick to point out that many foods contain ammonia, including cheese. “Sometimes ingredient names sound more complicated than they are,” a Kraft spokesperson piped up in defense. In other words, sometimes food doesn’t sound like food, and at a fast-food restaurant, its preparation doesn’t look like cooking.

“No one cooks here,” says the narrator of Claire Baglin’s On the Clock. She’s a recent hire at an unnamed but McDonald’s-coded fast-food franchise in France. “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.” In prose flecked with irony, she recites the restaurant’s mission, which echoes what mass-producers say matters most: consistency. If the texture of beef is the same every time, then the texture of experience must be just right too. How can pink slime be bad if it’s always pink, always slime, and the people keep coming back for more?

Consistency is king on both sides of the fast-food counter. “Our moves are the same moves crewmembers made twenty years ago,” Baglin’s narrator explains of her work. The vagueness of the word movesis telling—an action without object, its purpose and consequences unknown. A corporate-enforced estrangement from ingredients and production reigns. Better not to know exactly what you’re eating, and as a worker, better not to know exactly what you’re doing, just how to do it. Baglin’s assured debut is both an inventory of the impersonal world of fast food and a personal narrative of a working-class life. As a novel of work and family, one of On the Clock’s revelations is that work isfamily, or that in its consumption of the bodies of its workers, work partially consumes their home lives as well.

Like treated beef, Baglin’s novel is a lean, finely textured thing. In Jordan Stump’s translation from the French, the novel captures the little triumphs, stinging humiliations, and physical toll of labor. On the Clock’s narrator, a college student, has landed at the fast-food franchise during her summer break. The novel is divided into four sections. First, “The Interview,” and then once she’s hired, the three stations on which the narrator must be trained: “Out Front,” “Deep Fat,” and “Drive Thru.”

The prose is kinetic and spare. At the restaurant, cascades of voices, actions, and thoughts run together. Baglin doesn’t distinguish one voice from another or punctuate dialogue, and the narrator’s attempts to explain her tasks are continually interrupted by the need to perform them. The physical choreography doesn’t correspond to a similarly rich action of thought; often, the demands on the body dull the possibilities of the mind. This consequence is intentional in a workplace that forbids daydreaming and seeks to extend its jurisdiction into the psyches of its workers. Thus, Baglin presents a narrator whose control is unsteady, her authority permeable. She doubts, wonders, perhaps panics; admits the voices of coworkers and customers; finally, she tries to restore order:

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. A customer shows up with a coupon, he cut it from a receipt, can you wait just one moment please? I need a manager’s magnetic card to apply the discount. I’ll also use that card to open the cash register in case of a mistake and for my meal too, at the end of the shift, that’s the carte mana, the manager card.

Wearing the headset, the narrator hears voices so clearly and urgently she might mistake them, like the reader, for her own inner monologue. A hivemind of production and consumption overtakes the narration. In this way, the forces of industry are both generative and destructive, spawning a collective consciousness fluent in the language of the workplace but one that erodes the individual’s psychological and linguistic autonomy. Baglin’s prose pinpoints what’s most frightening about this kind of job: not that you and your coworkers might be indistinguishable from one another—scary enough—but that you might fuse with the machinery. In this unholy marriage, you’re the subordinate partner, a finger feebly swiping at the screen, unable to perform tasks a plastic card can accomplish. If you break down, your value won’t approach that of the surrounding equipment.

The account of the narrator’s job at the restaurant alternates with childhood memories of her working-class upbringing, featuring budget vacations to public campgrounds and visits to a similar—the same?—fast-food franchise. Sometimes, the alternations occur as frequently as every paragraph. Both timelines are rendered in the present tense, which grants the book a constant and exhausting nowness. I thought of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, in which the narrator promises a text “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.” But in On the Clock, the narrator is only occasionally in full command of this ravenous tense; more accurately, she’s another morsel. The relentless present Baglin has engineered suits an insatiable workplace that seeks to squeeze every ounce of productivity from its workers’ bodies and minds. It also creates a world in which personal history feels impossible to manage: what’s happening can’t be converted into what’s happened, the established past; instead, it careens forward into a fraught futurelessness of continuous cycles of financial hardship.

While scenes of the narrator’s childhood include her mother and younger brother, the novel draws out and accentuates the connection between her and her father, Jerome, a hardworking and frustrated factory electrician. Both suffer the psychological toll of workplace manipulation. Despite unsafe conditions and unpredictable hours, Jerome tries to derive value from his work and occasionally takes pleasure in it. Yet this also embarrasses him: when he’s given a meaningless award, he wishes he didn’t care. “He’s trying to fend off an intrusive pride and go back to his usual serious self, but he can’t fight it,” the narrator observes. The novel effectively shows that even as work dehumanizes, perhaps its greatest humiliation is convincing its workers to care about corporate standards of production and value. If professional survival depends on agreeing with the powers that be, and the powers that be hate you, why shouldn’t you hate you too? Still, “you can’t let it swallow you,” Jerome tells his daughter, a piece of advice and a shard of reflection. The novel’s structure indicates that she is gaining a new appreciation for the indignities of labor her father was subjected to—mostly because her own job hollows her out and leaves her to wonder what of herself remains.

Baglin pays close attention to uniforms, Jerome’s and the narrator’s, exploring what they mean to each of them. Jerome receives his new coveralls with pride. He lets his kids dress up in his work clothes, pose as blue-collar laborers. As the game peters out, he places his hardhat on the narrator’s head, but the anointment isn’t enough for her: “I want to go deeper into his character,” she says. “He’s crowned me, but I need more.” Part of his work will always be unknown to her, though, as hers will be to him. Jerome’s job—manual and skilled, protected from the trials of customer interface but physically riskier—is not the same as the narrator’s; if he found something in his work to take pride in, a professional identity he embraced, the narrator makes it clear that hers lacks that benefit. Fittingly, her own uniform is far less exciting. She unwraps the plastic-sheathed top, the faux-freshness of packaging trying to conceal that it was “many times dirtied by crewmembers before us,” a blouse literalizing her interchangeability in the eyes of the franchise.

Like wealth, economic precarity is inherited, unearned. The narrator and her father both wish to disrupt the lineage of lack. He compulsively trawls the dump for premature discards: “You can never have too many cables,” he says; “people are crazy they’re crazy,” he says, crazily, of the objects that others are willing to throw away. He fills their home with things he thinks he can fix, part of his dream to assemble a more materially comfortable life for his family. But the dream only clutters the home with garbage, making it less livable. “Outside my room the junk is climbing the walls,” the narrator observes of their apartment. “I can’t believe this, it’s hereditary, it’s in the genes,” her father says of the constant mess, his acknowledgement covering for the fact that he can’t, or won’t, change. The narrator segregates her belongings from her family’s, as though their stuff is infected with want, closing her door to preserve her realm within the home.

Her parents are keen to protect their children from what they have to endure. Repeatedly, they sequester themselves in their bedroom for private conversations. Jerome doesn’t even want his wife and kids to hug him when he gets home: “No no don’t touch me I’m a mess.” The book posits the notion, or at least the fear, of contagious misfortune, hardship by osmosis. “When Jerome fixes things he always wounds himself before he succeeds,” the narrator states, “as if the brokenness had to pass from the object to his body before it can disappear.” Labor is a physical malady, and once known, it’s likely to be remembered. The hope is that this work leads to something else: economic security, academic opportunity, a life less dependent on the body. On the Clockis both hopeful and skeptical that those rewards exist. “He shows us the fruit of his labors,” the narrator says, “but all we can see is his punctured hands, the cuts, bandages.”

On the Clockdocuments the material conditions of poverty, but Baglin charts its psychological and spiritual damages too. In one childhood memory, the narrator is writing a story about a girl who bravely wears red underwear, has a dog, whose father is maybe an academic type and perhaps saves her from the boys who accost her for wearing red underwear. Later, she types up the story on the family computer, another salvage project of her father’s. But the computer dies, and though her father applauds himself for rescuing the hard drive, the story is lost. It’s a small moment, but one that demonstrates the challenge of making art under conditions of economic precarity. It’s tempting to read the fritzing computer as a symbol of the father’s inability to materially provide for his children, but it more powerfully speaks to his failure to give his daughter the intellectual privacy and freedom she seeks. “I fixed it I fixed it,” he childishly insists, though she doesn’t care about the computer that destroyed her work.

In the flashbacks, the narrator mostly refers to her parents as “mama” and “my father.” But she also calls her father by his first name with particular frequency—a bit of cheek, a touch of the coldly formal, the expression of a wish to see him as something more than the totemic father figure, a complicated man who is now her peer in the workforce. But Baglin’s use of names also signals that the narrator is nother father: unlike him, she remains nameless throughout the book. Guarding her anonymity, the novel preserves her potential. What was permanent for Jerome is for her temporary—at least in her mind.

At the end of the novel, the narrator gets full marks on her performance evaluation at the fast-food restaurant. Like her father’s award, it’s a form of manipulation. “It’d be a shame not to sign a 20 out of 20,” says Chouchou, her terrible manager, warning her not to miss out on an opportunity to climb the ladder. Chouchou needs a successor, and the evaluation is part of her grooming campaign, undertaken for the company’s benefit: the narrator becoming the new Chouchou would allow them to upcycle one of their workers through the ranks.

After this meeting, she begins to remove her uniform and lets the evaluation fall into a pool of water. It’s tempting to interpret her action (or inaction) as hopeful, defiant: spurning the job that has tortured and reduced her. But another reading is simply that this work stultifies. Either the narrator has opted for silence, an indulgence the workers are denied on shift—or, chewed up by the devouring tense of the workday, she experiences the catatonia of fatigue.

On the Clock’s last, grim vision is of a workplace that can afford to disillusion and embitter its workers. Even if the narrator’s final act is rebellion, the company is more than prepared to part with her: she notices a new batch of employees getting ready for their shift. For a brief moment, Chouchou almost convinced us that consistency, so prized by the chain, equates to a premium on employee retention. But at the franchise, consistency means conformity, a crop of bodies in motion that do as they’re told. It’s a mission that can also, and perhaps more easily, be achieved when the workforce is always new, unaware of the indignities that lie in wait.