“There’s one thing about work, you can’t let it swallow you.” This is the most important piece of advice that Jérôme gives to his daughter, the narrator of On the Clock, French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novella. Translated into English this year by Jordan Stump, On the Clock numbers among a gaggle of recent fictional endeavors, across different mediums, focused on the alienating, even defamiliarizing experience of labor—from Olga Ravn’s The Employees to the Apple TV+ series Severance. Jérôme’s warning underscores, in the broadest strokes, an enduring cross-cultural preoccupation with labor’s intractable grip on life, all the more transfixing for its seemingly insoluble hold: “You can’t let yourself get sucked in otherwise that’s it…. Watch out, watch out for work.”

Jérôme, a factory electrician, might not be referring only to jobs similar to his own when he admonishes his daughter against this capitulation to one’s career. But Baglin—whose own father worked in a factory—focuses her novella squarely on working-class labor, with exacting attention paid to its grinding toil and the abiding financial instability that its meager paychecks typically yield. Rather than focusing on the sterile impersonality of the corporate office—a fixation of many of her peers—Baglin illuminates the blue-collar workplace and foregrounds its simultaneous demands and denials of the human bodies that power it.

In On the Clock, both father and daughter labor in jobs that spurn any claim to bodily sanctity; safety and comfort are privileges conferred stingily, if at all. Jérôme, whose line of work already entails significant physical risk, regularly performs his duties alone, at the formidable heights of a boom lift’s far-reaching neck. As a young adult, his daughter confronts her own set of dodgy working conditions when she helms the fry station at a fast-food restaurant and spends long hours engulfed by a sweltering haze of oil and salt. (During her interview, the hiring manager pointedly asks, “You’re not scared of Covid, or some other disease?”) Baglin’s emphasis on the bodily dangers of working-class labor can feel unrelenting, and pointedly so, for it never turns an eye from the indignity and filth that is inherent to so many physically demanding occupations. The result is a seething and tenacious contribution to proletarian literature—one that imposes upon its readers a sweaty, agitating intimacy with the embodied and emotional duresses of a shift at the fry station. It’s a breathless ride, devoid of sentiment, that delivers to its readers a swift, somatic wallop. One finds oneself reeling at the narrative’s end, deposited without ceremony and almost without warning. We must decide whether our own philosophies of work are changed for it.

On the Clock centers primarily on the experiences of its narrator—also named Claire, although we don’t learn her name until the end of the book—who spends one grueling summer working at a fast-food chain. (As such, the novella is organized into four aptly titled sections: “The Interview,” “Out Front,” “Deep Fat,” and “Drive-Thru.”) We are not privy to Claire’s reason for seeking this job; however, the hiring manager’s reference to the abundance of job applications he has received for the position implies that there are few seasonal employment options available nearby to a young adult home from university. Baglin juxtaposes these episodes with Claire’s memories from her childhood, which focus on her father and the benign tumult of his domestic influence. This oscillating perspective guides us to a certain understanding of Claire and her class position. Since girlhood, she has sought opportunities for upward mobility, through a “junior internship,” admission to boarding school, and now university. Still, she carries Jérôme’s habits and legacy: his lopsided care and tenderness; the familial inheritance of poverty, which ostensibly requires her to work during summer break; and a simmering awareness of workplace injustice.

Jérôme only appears in flashbacks; still, he is the book’s molten center. Baglin’s paternal portrait is finespun—and at times, almost unbearable in its depiction of a loving, abashed man who is battered by the occupation to which he’s dedicated his life. Jérôme navigates fatherhood with a jittery solicitude born from perennial hardship. “So, happy?” he asks Claire and her younger brother, Nico, “every five minutes” as they revel in an uncommon fast-food dinner, paid for with coupons. To his wife’s chagrin, Jérôme takes the family dumpster-diving every weekend, cramming the apartment with discarded electronics, “the latest thing from years ago that he can boast about rescuing, and about how well it works.” Jérôme’s desperation quivers on the page, and one senses that he exhausts himself in an effort to impress his family, who both adores and is embarrassed by him. Yet when they all travel to a beach campsite for summer vacation, Jérôme finds rest elusive: “He stares at the ocean as if someone were drowning out there and he can’t do anything about it.”

Jérôme is, perhaps, seeing a vision of himself. When his wife, Sylvie, worries about the occupational hazards of his job—“You can’t keep going up in the cherry picker with nobody on the ground”—Jerôme silences her with the weight of his resignation: “It’s been reported, but they couldn’t care less, you know how it is.”

When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1905, it served as a fictional vehicle for his muckraking instincts, unearthing as it did the rank corruption in America’s meatpacking industry. Sinclair made waves (and enemies) with his book, and yet since then Anglo-American fiction has seen relatively few depictions of the jobs consigned to its working classes. “Even in the politically committed proletarian fictions of the 1930s…plots tend to focus more on working class life and labor actions than work or labor exclusively,” writes John Macintosh in his entry “Fictions of Work and Labor” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction. Macintosh regards this absence as the result of “a longstanding representational problem”: How does a writer render work—so often characterized by mechanized tedium—into action that rises and falls, coaxing a reader’s attentiveness and curiosity?

There have been a number of recent examples in fiction, among them Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted and Dustin M. Hoffman’s short story collection Such a Good Man. Moreover, the vast commercial success of Stephanie Land’s memoir, Maid, indicates the reading public’s interest in first-person narrative accounts of blue-collar labor. But despite this growing body of literature, working-class lives are more often depicted in journalistic form, one exemplified by the work of writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Matthew Desmond. One possible explanation for this generic asymmetry—which On the Clock seems to intuit—is the general reader’s affective bandwidth for realities they do not consider livable. A knee-jerk pleasure, even a kind of guilty relief, sometimes arises when reading the grim details of working-class existence, for it enables a more privileged reader to reaffirm their sense of social difference, even superiority, in the name of self-education. Journalism’s formal guardrails, which frequently preclude intimate interiority or ambivalence, enable a reader to fulfill this urge without the destabilizing proximity that characterizes Baglin’s work.

Since roughly 1980, service industries like fast food have loomed large in the American working-class sphere, bestowing transnational relevance upon Baglin’s narrative premise. As Macintosh observes, this “interactive service work,” which is “performed precisely through interpersonal communication and emotion,” might better lend itself to fictional forms. (He also notes that labor of this sort enjoys uneven representation: American writers are far more inclined to set a novel in the world of fine dining than they are in a Wendy’s or a Taco Bell, precisely because the latter employment comes across as less desirable, less “clean” than the former.)

Baglin, for her part, does not allow her readers to overlook the fast-food kitchen’s mundane, grease-covered details, nor does she peddle any kind of voyeurism. The text turns on a near-merciless hyperspecificity that can make a reader twitch: the fruity reek of cleaning products, dead skin flaking off a thumb, a globule of sweat pointedly left to drip down someone’s nose. It feels, at times, like a provocation: “Why would a person want to read a story about work?” the text prods. “What sort of entertainment did you think you’d find here?”