“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of speaking about them.” But he can only acknowledge this problem, not solve it. A child of factory workers who’s now a professor of philosophy, Eribon admits quite readily that his entire family votes for the National Rally, and that he would not want to put his mother or brothers in charge of public policy of any kind. And, with chagrin, he admits that his life as an author and professor has taken him so far from his family culturally that he has, more or less, cut himself off from them. For him, it’s too late.

Such stories of class transition are, in fact, a fine French tradition, to which some of the country’s most talented writers of recent years have made contributions. The most recent example in this genre is Claire Baglin’s impressive autobiographical debut novel, On the Clock, which made a splash in the French literary world. But so too did Annie Ernaux’s memoir A Man’s Place, and Édouard Louis’s novel Who Killed My Father. All three books describe class transition as a life-defining rupture, almost an act of violence. In their accounts, the gap between classes—rarely discussed or even thought about by those on its privileged side—is a chasm that those who have crossed must spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with.

Both Claire, the protagonist of On the Clock, and her father work hard, and it shows on their hands. Claire works at a fast-food chain, where the powerful disinfectant she uses to swab down surfaces irritates her skin. “Every front-room crew member has a white thumb,” writes Baglin, “their skin flakes and sloughs off when they wash their hands.” Her father is a maintenance man in an appliance factory, and his fingertips are stained black from a lifetime of working with machinery: “Stigmata, impossible to wash away.” Baglin’s On the Clock interweaves the story of father and daughter, a generation apart but both contending with arbitrary rules, petty bosses, and deadening alienation. In the present, Claire moves between workstations, mops up spills, and feuds silently with her boss. In the past, she recalls, in a succession of vignettes, a childhood dominated by her father’s work.

Baglin was just 22 when the novel was published by the prestigious Éditions de Minuit in 2022, and On the Clock has gotten a good deal of attention in France, with Baglin interviewed everywhere. Part of the reason the book has made such an impression is simply that it’s rare to find a 22-year-old who writes so well. The immediacy with which Baglin evokes the narrator’s past makes the reader imagine the eerily observant child who could have recorded such impressions. Of Claire’s little brother, eating cereal: “He looks at me with round eyes, no, he doesn’t look at me, I serve as a visual support for his frantic mastication, like the TV.” Of Claire’s father: “When Jérôme fixes things he always wounds himself before he succeeds, as if the brokenness had to pass from the object to his body before it can disappear.” The novel is especially successful in its portrait of Jérôme, who appears as both an adored father and an exploited employee, slowly martyred by work.

But, naturally, a good deal of the attention on a book like this has focused on its subject matter: a novel about service work by a writer from a working-class background. In interviews, Baglin has tried to deflect this kind of attention. Speaking to the magazine Diakritic, she said that when writing the book, “I wanted to escape a certain tendency toward sociological demonstration or the trajectory of a class defector” (my translation). No self-respecting novelist would want her book discussed as a sociological exercise, least of all a writer who takes as much care with her prose as Baglin does.

But, reading the novel, it’s impossible not to think about class and class defection. And that’s at least partly because the comparison it draws between the narrator and her father’s work is not entirely convincing. It’s obvious that that Claire, a university student with a summer job, is already leaving her working-class background behind, even as she’s making fries. Her fingers will heal, but her father’s will stay stained.

Baglin’s sensitive portrayal of Jérôme brings to mind Annie Ernaux’s classic memoir of her own father, A Man’s Place. The book begins with her father’s death. After the funeral, she takes the train back to Paris, and the reader expects that she will now have a few moments to herself to begin to grieve. Instead, she writes, “I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no taste for noise and restless children. I suddenly realized with astonishment: ‘Now I really am bourgeois’ and ‘It’s too late now.’”

This cool observation, in place of emotion, points to the method of the book. A Man’s Place is explicitly painting a portrait of her father’s class, not of his personal life. The reader learns not about his inner life or his relationship with Ernaux, but, instead, about his material conditions: his childhood working on a farm (“He slept above the stables on a straw mattress with no sheets”), his adolescence working in a rope factory (“After the siren was sounded in the evening, he was free and he no longer smelt of the dairy”), and, finally, his adulthood running a small café and grocery in a provincial town. The pitiless way Ernaux lays out these facts amounts to a kind of judicial case against the society that doomed her father to a life of poverty and subservience.

But the other side of this anger is Ernaux’s guilt; after all, she escaped this life. A Man’s Place is thus also the story of Ernaux’s change of place: leaving her hometown for university, and marrying a bourgeois man. She finds that when she visits home, she and her father have little to talk about, and their lives seem alien to each other. The distance that came between them, she writes, is “like fractured love.” The book’s epigraph is a quote from Jean Genet: “Writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.” By the end of A Man’s Place, the reader has the impression that the book is Ernaux’s way of responding to that feeling of fractured love, the expression of grief she declines to make after her father’s funeral.

For Ernaux, a bright student in the expanding economy of the 1960s, class defection was a kind of inevitable tragedy. But for Édouard Louis—growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s—such defection was as dramatic as it was unlikely.

Today one of France’s most celebrated writers, Louis grew up in destitution so total that early readers of his memoir rejected it as unbelievable. As a child, he recounts in The End of Eddy (2017), he was regularly sent to neighbors’ houses to beg for food. Growing up, he suffered not just from poverty but from brutal homophobic bullying. It’s hardly surprising that—unlike Ernaux—Louis’s initial attitude toward his origins is totally unconflicted: He hates the village he grew up in and is powerfully attracted to anything that takes him away from it. When his best friend invites him into her middle-class home, he’s struck dumb with admiration:

When she opened the door I understood who she was, or rather why she was the person she was; there were thousands of books, an antique piano, reproductions of paintings on the walls. The floors were carpeted, the house was full of armchairs, like invitations to read and reflect, as if Elena herself was a creation of her house’s architecture. … I thought: This is the life I want to live.

In Change (2024), he even describes his first sexual experience as a kind of sanctifying class transformation. “In making love with a man,” he writes, “I rejected all the values of my milieu, I became bourgeois.”

Louis wants quite explicitly to join the ruling class, and succeeds: His first book makes him world famous at the age of 21.

But once he has secured his escape from his past, Louis finds himself returning to the same theme as Baglin and Ernaux: his father and his father’s work. His father, just like Claire’s, worked for years in a factory, until a workplace accident crippled him and forced him to make a living as a street sweeper, his social benefits reduced by regular rounds of austerity. In Who Killed My Father, Louis writes, of the man who once terrorized him, “You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.” Thinking about the injustice of his father’s fate, he finds himself alienated from the bourgeois world he has worked so hard to join. “For the ruling class,” he writes, “politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”

Louis’s book about his father, unlike Ernaux’s, is explicitly political: a cry of rage against the politicians whose policies he believes destroyed his father’s body. His book, and his rage, are not addressed to the people he grew up with to stir them to action or solidarity—in Change, Louis wrote that, at the time he went to high school, he had never seen his parents with a book in their hand—but to the class that Louis belongs to now: to educate, to provoke, and to shame.

The same is true of Ernaux. She writes, of her father’s childhood on a farm, “He had everything that makes the powerful, the influential and the writers in newspapers say, ‘Ah, but they’re happy after all.’” Here, her acid is not for the readers in her hometown, but, rather, for the ones in Paris.

Neither Baglin, Ernaux, nor Louis uses the word “capitalism,” “exploitation,” or “inequality.” These books don’t preach liberation. But they are suffused with a sense of injustice that goes deeper than any political analysis or policy prescription.

Anger at poverty, guilt at having escaped, disorientation at two worlds existing side by side. These books explore a zone of deep discomfort, not just for their authors, who carry the burden of double loyalty and double identity, but for their largely bourgeois readers, for whom it’s impossible to read these accounts without a sense of shame.

On the Clock is not a book with a social message. Still, you cannot read it without feeling ashamed of all the times you’ve gone to a fast-food restaurant, without thinking much about what working there is like; or the times you’ve driven by a factory of the kind Claire’s father works in, without wondering what goes on inside. I think this is the real reason this slim, coolly controlled book received so much attention in France. It’s not social comment—it’s a gut punch.

Neither Baglin, Ernaux, nor Louis uses the word “capitalism,” “exploitation,” or “inequality.” These books don’t preach liberation. But they are suffused with a sense of injustice that goes deeper than any political analysis or policy prescription. Reading them, we understand what Ernaux meant when, as a young woman, she wrote in her diary: “I will write to avenge my race.” Eribon and Louis have written explicitly that they do the same. When Baglin describes how Claire’s father scrubs and scrubs at his hands to try to scour away the stains on his fingers; or how he tells his daughter, “watch out, watch out for work”; or how, after he is almost electrocuted in a workplace accident, his boss anxiously asks him, “That was your fault, right?” she joins this tradition, too.