Details

Subject(s)

• Food service employees—Employment—Fiction [Browse]

Translator

• Stump, Jordan, 1959- [Browse]

Library of Congress genre(s)

• Novels [Browse]

Series

New Directions paperbook ; 1624. [More in this series]

Summary note

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN

• 9780811239356
• 0811239357 (paperback)

LCCN

2024052375

OCLC

1442731587

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