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.
Erens excels at mapping the mind’s movement between present action, memory, and back again — several passages in which the concrete illuminates consciousness and vice-versa achieve an almost Woolfian sublimity, as when Lore, looking at a painting in the hospital, hears Julia’s voice critiquing the art for being amateur and sentimental...But for all the stylistic wonders of Eleven Hours, the book’s success depends on its quieter, structural feats: Erens has built her story with architectural rigor, manipulating plot, perspective, and pacing to build narrative tension and heighten suspense.
The writing is candid without being sensational, detailed without being clinical. This admirable novel reminds us that even when childbirth is overseen by caring professionals in state-of-the-art facilities, it still arrives on waves of blood.
The book is fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth ... Those with delicate sensibilities should be forewarned: Erens never flinches here and in this incisive novel about birth, she bears witness to its beauty and brutality.
Eleven Hours is crafted with the taut economy of The Understory, and with the same laser focus on human alienation. In fewer than 180 virtuoso pages, Erens knits together two women, two lives, two stories. Each woman has borne serious trials; each is detached from her family of origin, albeit for different reasons. Each has reason to worry about bringing new life into this world. They are together, but brutally alone. And yet for the duration of Lore’s hospital stay, their communion feels both necessary and illuminating. What passes between Franckline and Lore lifts them above despair, thrusting them toward life itself.
