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Summary
Summary
Lore arrives at the hospital alone--no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward--herself on the verge of showing--is patient with the young woman. She knows what it's like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.
Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that's waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she's exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens's novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood--with fear and joy, anguish and awe.
Author Notes
PAMELA ERENS's second novel, The Virgins, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was named a Best Book of 2013 by the New Yorker, the New Republic, Library Journal, and Salon. The novel was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award for the best book of fiction published in 2013. Pamela's debut novel, The Understory, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as Elle, Vogue, the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Millions.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Early one wintry morning, Lore, an elementary school speech therapist who is nine-months pregnant, enters a New York City hospital alone. Her contractions have started, and though she isn't terribly far along, her assigned nurse, Franckline, quickly sets her up in the maternity ward, where the duo ride out the long process of Lore's labor together. As the hours pass, the women sit in Lore's room and walk the hospital halls, and snippets of their histories come to light-including Franckline's time as a midwife's helper in her native Haiti and Lore's difficult childhood, as well as the complicated love triangle that resulted in her solo trip to the hospital. In addition, it isn't long before Franckline's own early pregnancy is revealed. After several miscarriages, however, Franckline is afraid to tell her husband of her condition until she is certain her baby will survive. Written with incredible clarity, this third novel from Erens (The Virgins) is a wonder, shifting between two protagonists with ease to tell a deeply personal narrative of childbirth, complete with tension, horror, and deep, mature emotion. This novel does not sentimentalize the delivery of a child but rather examines the surprise-mental and physical-that accompanies it. Labor stories are as old as time, but Erens's novel feels incredibly fresh and vivid. An outstanding accomplishment. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In Erens' (The Virgins, 2013) latest, two women, both pregnant, meet in a hospital delivery room. Lore is in labor and alone but for nurse Franckline, who hasn't yet told anyone she's expecting. Over the next half-day, between Lore's contractions, the two women contemplate what has brought them to the moment at hand, and Erens seamlessly allows us access to each woman's interior life. Save for a period of near-matrimony, Lore's life has been solitary since she cared for her dying mother. Franckline was once surrounded by family and has helped women give birth since she was a child herself in Haiti. Franckline mistrusts Lore's lengthy birth plan, and Lore mistrusts nearly everyone, yet the women find in one another something to lean on throughout the pain, the uncertainty, the immediate and universal terror of childbirth that Erens so viscerally portrays. Erens' short novel is beautiful, contained, and remarkable. That a novel about the universal, essential, yet ordinary and often addressed process of bringing about new life could be so fresh is something readers can get lost considering.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"ELEVEN HOURS," by Pamela Erens, is a story about birth, which is to say a story about life and death. You could read the novel in less time than it takes many women to endure the first stage of labor - though for the anxiety it induces, I wouldn't recommend it to the laboring woman trying to pass the time. In her previous two books, "The Virgins" and "The Understory," Erens wrote from the first-person perspectives of disturbed and damaged men. "Eleven Hours" is told from the perspectives of two female characters and unfolds, as labor does, as continuous experience, shifting fluidly across time and point of view without chapter breaks, with barely a pause for air. Lore, in labor, arrives alone at a New York City hospital. Franckline, a maternity nurse in the second trimester of her own pregnancy, is baffled, for this is "almost unheard-of: Even the homeless addicts sometimes have a man or a friend." The women's exchanges are initially wary, prickly. But soon the two are thrown into a fierce, physical intimacy as Franckline coaxes Lore through the waves of pain. Lore "wraps her arms hard around Franckline's frame- Their faces are inches apart and Lore can smell the subtle, spicy odor of Franckline's skin- She doesn't want to shout or moan into Franckline's face, but the nurse is encouraging her, urging her, and she complies." Through the curve and sway of memory we learn about Lore's and Franckline's lives outside the hospital. Both women have faced isolating hardship. Both are exiled from family: Franckline from her parents and siblings in Haiti; Lore, parentless, from her chosen tribe in New York - the father of her child and her mercurial best friend, both of whom have betrayed her. Franckline has deep experience with the trauma of labor, having been an eager witness since childhood. Every time "she would run, more than a mile if necessary," to see "the squatting woman, the way her sisters and aunties and cousins would cluster around her, gripping her arms and steadying her hips, running with sweat all of them, the parched lips and the low humming songs; it was like the races the older boys and young men sometimes ran against each other, the strain of bodies pushed to their limits, the pain, the exhaustion, the glory in the finish, but better because more violent." Older now and wounded by pregnancies gone wrong, Franckline knows better than to romanticize birth's violence. "Having a child is usually just a long patience," she tells Lore, though both know there's no "just" about it. It may be impossible to reproduce in prose the sensation of labor. But Erens beautifully evokes its insistent rhythms and protective deliriums. As Lore submits to a new surge of pain, "the place behind her eyes winks with pricks of light, interior stars, and, slowly, location retreats. There is no room around her, no hospital- She is untethered, a blurry presence smudged across a dense atmosphere." "Lore," the noun, refers to a body of knowledge, to story passed down. Pregnant women are often assured this knowledge resides in the body itself. "Surrender," they are told. "Your body knows what to do." Into Lore's mouth Erens pours the argot of birth manuals, which impart a story of their own about what makes a "good" birth, and how to prepare. Lore seems more prepared than most. Yet 30 pages from the end of "Eleven Hours" she is thrust into a savage agony, and we find ourselves inside a novel with the adrenaline-rush pacing of an action movie, the gut-turning terror of a horror flick. We are reminded that every birth is an event without script, the ultimate suspense story. Erens registers this without preaching and without judgment, creating one of the most realistic and harrowing portrayals of birth you are likely to encounter in fiction. She has also written an indelible portrait of two women coming to terms with the desire, fear, crushing losses and fragile joys that have carved their lives, and who know what it means to fight every hour, every minute, to take another breath. JEN MCDONALD, a former editor at the Book Review, is an editor and writer based in Chicago.
Kirkus Review
An unflinching look at pregnancy and childbirth. Lore arrives at the hospital alone, carrying a single duffel bag and an extremely detailed birth plan. Franckline, the maternity nurse charged with her care, soon learns this this taciturn, prickly woman is no more enthusiastic about accepting help than she is about fetal monitoring or an IV. But Franckline knows when to recede and when to insist, and, as pain breaks down Lore's self-reliance, these two strangers form a bond that is singular in its intimacy and intensity. Erens' second book, The Virgins (2013), was a study in teenage sex and friendship and a critical favorite. Her debut novel, The Understoryfirst published in 2007 and rereleased in 2014was a close look at the devastating power of loneliness. Erens excels at reading the entrails of dreadful experiences and messy relationships. Her exquisite prose is what keeps readers from turning away. In between contractions, Lore remembers her dead mother and her absent father. She alternately loathes and longs for her baby's father as she obsessively revisits scenes from their time together. When she's not tending Lore, Franckline's thoughts turn to her own pregnancyso new that she hasn't even told her husband about it. These glimpses inside the minds and hearts of two women are richly rendered, but this novel's greatest achievement is its excruciatingly vivid depiction of what it is to grow and carry and deliver a child. Erens makes it clear thatat bestgiving birth is an awful ordeal. And, by combining portraits of a woman at the beginning of her pregnancy and a woman on the brink of motherhood, Erens shows that there is not one moment between these two experiences without peril. Powerfulaesthetically and viscerally. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In a Manhattan hospital, two women are each pregnant-one obviously, the other not yet visibly. Lore arrives with no partner, no friends, and no support, but she is armed with a several-page birth plan with which she expects to control the impossible. The main nurse who attends her is Franckline, an immigrant from one "of the French-speaking islands, Haiti, maybe, or Guadeloupe," who is also pregnant, although still unable to feel secure about the not-yet-baby within. While Lore labors, Franckline will work hard to calm, soothe, coach, and care for her, even as she worries about her own impending motherhood. As they wait and work, both women find themselves remembering, regretting, and reconsidering the respective pasts that brought them each to this point-pregnant, nervous, uncertain. Beautiful and brutal, Erens's (The Virgins) third novel is a revelatory meditation on relationships-between adults, lovers, friends, parents, and children of all ages. Veteran narrator Cassandra Campbell employs her usual arsenal of accents and intonations to enhance Erens's impeccable prose with both urgency and grace. VERDICT A quick, intense, and viscerally electrifying story that leaves behind vestiges of fear, panic, and hope; libraries should order immediately.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
