On the ClockOn the Clock

"Claire Baglin's On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator's summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and a sharp ear for workplace jargon, dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin's depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. The past is remarkably vivid in On the Clock: her childhood memories of their bleak small town and of summer vacations spent at campgrounds by the sea in Brittany resonate"--