In her last novel, The Virgins, Pamela Erens created an unreliable narrator without rival, so it comes as no surprise that her latest offering, Eleven Hours, demonstrates similar audacity. Her subject is childbirth, an experience it’s near impossible to capture, but Erens rises admirably to the challenge, this slim novel pulsing with an urgent life force.
The setting is a maternity ward in a New York hospital, the central characters two women: 31-year-old Lore, who arrives alone, in labour with her first child but seemingly unperturbed, her birth plan and insurance card in hand; and Franckline, the nurse assigned to Lore’s care, herself newly pregnant, not yet showing but aware of the fragility of the foetus growing inside her. Thrown together by circumstance, they’re the poles of each other’s existence for the duration of the next 11 hours.
Flashbacks entangled with the present drama reveal the backstories of each. Fragments of Franckline’s life: her childhood in Haiti, where she demonstrated an early skill for the demands of midwifery; the birth of her own baby, who died only days later; her exile from her family; and her subsequent life in America, a happy marriage marred only by miscarriage. Lore, meanwhile, is afforded a more substantial history, a brutal tale of loss, loneliness and eventual betrayal, which has left her “both father and mother to this child”.
It’s “one of the most ordinary stories in the universe”, Erens reminds us, a necessary prompt since her most impressive skill is the effortless way she transforms the commonplace into the captivating – I would have greedily devoured a whole novel’s worth of the love triangle Lore unwittingly finds herself in. A similar alchemy is at work when it comes to Erens’s central subject; her visceral depiction of the full gamut of the agonies and ecstasies of childbirth is strikingly original. This is a novel that pushes beyond “the side of birth that manifests in lusty cries, in pink health,” instead invoking the experience’s horror-story elements: “The baby will have to come out. It will have to come out that way,” thinks Lore with chilling realisation. Nowhere have I read a more delightfully stomach-churning account of the indecencies, the invasiveness and the violence of bringing life into the world.
• Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens is published by Atlantic (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
