On the Clock

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.)