On the clock

The many ugly facets of capitalism are on full display in French writer Baglin's raw and searching debut novel told in two parallel narratives that become increasingly intertwined. In one, a young narrator describes the frenetic pace and crushing working conditions at a fast-food restaurant where productivity is measured in the number of orders you get out the door, no matter what. The narrator's family is on the edge of poverty, and their trials form the second skein of the story. Central to that is the narrator's father, a long-suffering electrical technician who also feels like a mere cog in the machine. In juxtaposition, daughter and father underscore the hopelessness of the working poor. After decades of service, is her father's low-paying job the only sort of future the narrator can hope to achieve? At times the switching of perspectives can feel dizzying at the expense of plot, making the novel feel more like an insightful documentary. But Baglin, ably translated by Stump, hits the right triumphant notes in her narrator's striking, energetic voice, with surprising touches of humor.

In Baglin's concise and arresting debut, narrator Claire intercuts her chronicle of a summer spent working at a fast-food restaurant in Normandy when she's 20 with episodes from her childhood in a working-class family. Claire takes the reader through the training process at the restaurant and documents the ordeals of each work station as she deals with impatient and picky customers and learns the hypnotic rhythm of the deep fryer ("I shake the basket, let it go, pick it up again, buzzer, whirl around... the oil splatters and pinches my forearms.... The customers who send back their fries because they're not hot enough, I long to plunge their hands into the boiling oil"). In alternating paragraphs that seamlessly blend with the present-day action, Claire paints a portrait of her family's struggles with poverty. Her father, Jérôme, works at a factory and regularly refurbishes items he fishes out of a dumpster to furnish their small, cluttered apartment. The simplicity of the prose only enhances the harrowing story as Baglin juxtaposes the kindhearted Jérôme's bitterness over his 20 years of factory labor with Claire's immersion into her own grueling workdays. Readers will be stirred. (Mar.)