The novel, a complex mosaic of urban life, has an extensive dramatis personae ... Worried that I might get confused, I started jotting their names down and drawing lines of connection between them. I ended up with a spiderweb scrawl. Not that I needed it. Just when I thought I had reached the point when I couldn’t meet another person, the superficial introductions stopped and the deeper story began to play out ... This novel works a bit like Soho itself. It starts one lunchtime, midsummer, on a street corner at a restaurant table. You begin to take note of the place and its people and their often faintly bewildering habits. Mozley’s prose is simple but acute — if sometimes a little too much like a screenplay. Her piecemeal observations of appearances, habits and actions, her fragments of direct speech like snippets of overheard conversation, her sudden quick plunges into the mind of a character slowly build, snippet by snippet, adding texture and understanding ... Mozley is adept at descriptive detail that doubles as an aperçu ... Stock characters develop swiftly into believable people ... The Soho Mozley captures with such intensity is not a mere locality. It is a microcosm of swarming humanity.
Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew is a tale of villainous gentrification inspired by those Soho raids ... a novel of ownership and kinship, domain, dominion and dirt. But where Elmet was quiet and clenched, Hot Stew is gregarious. Mozley has traded Yorkshire gothic for West End burlesque... Hot Stew corrals a bustling cast, ensnared in a web of politics, intimacy and power ... a surprisingly decorous novel. It borders on the squeamish about the squelching, ordinary realities of bodies and desire, while kinks become glib punchlines. Mozley is decorous about the politics, too ... At its best, it recalls the kind of capacious, rollicking satires Britain produced in and around the Thatcher era – ambitious, scathing and damn good fun. If only Hot Stew had more heat.
There’s a dazzling panning shot at the start where she introduces us to almost all the major characters without pausing for breath ... Like Dickens or Balzac, Mozley is interested in breathing life into cliches, using two-dimensionality to gain breadth and social reach. Mozley has a background as a medievalist academic and her ease with typologies, with tavern life, and indeed with bawdy good-heartedness, may owe something to that period ... Mozley’s achievement is to create room for ambivalence and nuance, even when the book’s world is drawn with such cartoonish vigour. Are the police right to want to crack down so vehemently on sex trafficking that they end up destroying the lives of prostitutes? Are the prostitutes right to mock the feminists who urge them to protect their bodies from men? ... In an age when so many novelists of Mozley’s generation take refuge in the dystopian, she has reinvigorated large-scale social realism for our times.
Despite so many characters, the novel doesn’t flail, it succeeds as a force ... To direct so many through a labyrinthine story in just over 300 pages is a kind of mastery. The careful ingredients of Hot Stew combine to expose the potency of old narratives ... in every conceptual detail, possibly to exhaustion, Hot Stew presses its truth about sex. Or maybe it doesn’t—maybe that sensation is less the writer’s touch and more the reader’s eye: once you see it, it’s everywhere.
[U]ndeniably Dickensian in style, but its concerns couldn’t be more contemporary ... Set in and around a crumbling Soho townhouse that will become a key battleground in the war of gentrification waged by an icily unscrupulous landlord, Hot Stew introduces us to an interconnected cast of characters spanning every social strata ... That all these disparate stories are able to finally knot together cogently is testament to careful plotting. A final twist feels cleverly conceived, instead of coming off like a last-minute tidy-up job, and had me combing back through the story to look for clues I might have missed ... This is a compelling snapshot of a city teeming with vitality, a love letter to, as one character puts it, 'the sense of being at the centre of things,' and a reminder of what London stands to lose if its stories are wiped out in pursuit of profit.
If there is something slightly pious about this, it is still a neat way into a lot of idiocy and hypocrisy in modern life. There are some lovely observations ... Occasionally the snail’s pace grinds to a halt ... But the novel is so precise and granular in its evocation of London that it made me thoroughly homesick while reading it. And Mozley is very good on the degree to which circumstance shapes interior life.
[A]n oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in and out of each other’s lives but rarely seem to capture the author’s full imagination ... The most engaging figures are the prostitutes and their ‘maids’, former prostitutes themselves who help with the women’s day-to-day lives. The humour and solidarity between these people, particularly in the face of ruthless developers who wish to move them along, helps vivify the book ... Overall, however, it is hard to see what all this amounts to — and it could also have been a bit more fun.
Mozley, who is now based in Edinburgh, offers a vision of the district that is full of competing interests, sex, violence and encroaching gentrification ... What follows is a gallimaufry of a novel. In short, here comes everybody ... 'Sprawling' describes the cast and plot, but not the writing, it should be noted. Mozley’s prose is precise, controlled, unshowy, deceptively readable. She tells the story through dialogue and short, sharp sentences ... She’s great at detail. And there are moments when she can change the mood from one sentence to the next, the way life can change in an instant and forever ... Perhaps, you could argue that some of the characters are stock types. Maybe too, you could argue that the book’s climax is too much of a deus ex machina (for all the prior notice that is elegantly given) ... Reading that feels like a promise of a life now lost but maybe one day soon, vaccines permitting, regained.
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley is everything that is wrong with the contemporary literary landscape of sex work. It is the embodiment of the eye-rolling narrative spun by outsider writers of considerable privilege ... Sex working characters written by writers such as Mozely are oddly masculine in their aesthetic. There is an obsession with casting the male gaze onto the bodies of whores that trap sex workers in known literary representations ... Ironically, Hot Stew criticizes the gentrifying class wars that seek to eradicate the prostitute within Soho, yet the book is sold by a gentrified visual facade of sex work ... Just because outsiders, like Mozley, can write about marginalized communities does not mean that they should. If anything, their questionable ethical approaches and blasé attitudes about writing about sex work communities should be held to higher standards, given the devastating real-life consequences for sex workers.
Though there are many houses in contemporary fiction, Hot Stew is a rare specimen of the property novel — a drama centered on the mechanisms of home rental and ownership. It explores not just the connections within a particular house but the ways in which the very concept of home has become precarious. Though the novel is set in London, many of the conditions it dramatizes exist in Los Angeles and any number of American cities where rents keep rising, neighborhoods continue to change and tenants who have made homes are priced out or forced out ... What emerges is simultaneously a portrait of inextricable connection and total alienation. All these lives overlap, both physically and in their relation to payment and profit, networks of exploitation, systems that Mozley makes plain ... In this neo-Dickensian milieu, Mozley leans into the caricatures rather than away from them. The rich, especially, have a cartoonish villainy...This heavy-handedness at times gives the novel a certain flatness; despite their entanglements, the good guys and the bad guys are easy to tell apart. At its best, though, Mozley’s social satire is a refreshing turn away from interiority and toward a kind of analytical, social realist plotting of economic relationships ... Yet some of the best passages of Hot Stew are about place, not people.
If Elmet was a full-bodied wine that had lain maturing for years in the cellars, Hot Stew is like a young sparkling wine with more fizz than taste, lively, enjoyable, insubstantial. The publishers offer this judgement or recommendation on the front cover: 'a rollicking tale'; fair enough ... There is schmaltz here, reminiscent of the novels Wolf Mankowitz used to write about the East End ... Mozley writes with great verve and lively invention. Yet, while there are some good comic passages, and the central theme – which is the destructive power of money and its disregard for human values – will meet with approval from many readers, the novel veers too often into what is fanciful rather than imaginative. The register is inconsistent. There are too many scenes which simply don’t work and this makes for an impression of incoherence. A severe editor might have suggested revision which would have cut many passages and improved the novel by eliminating much that seems self-indulgent ... Mozley is very talented, there is no doubt about that. There is much that is enjoyable here. But the novel is badly structured and incoherent. At moments it is a comic extravaganza; at others it promises to deal with genuine emotions and real questions, then draws back. Mozley hasn’t fallen at the second novel hurdle, but she hasn’t quite cleared it and so stumbles before regaining her balance. I have no doubt that she will write better novels, ones which more fully engage with the realities of experience. This book may then be recognized as a holding action, a staging-post on what should be a distinguished career.
With masterful prose, through over a half-dozen point-of-view characters, [Mozley] tells a story about money and power, love and art, sex work and gentrification – and those are just some of the proteins in this complex stew ... There’s a lot going on in this sprawling, ambitious novel ... Mozley writes convincingly about class and gender dynamics; in contrast, she writes only glancingly, skittishly about race. Precious is Black, as is at least one other point-of-view character, but in a book that takes on gentrification and sex work, the intersections of race with class and gender are left unexplored ... Of course, there’s only so much one novel can do, and Hot Stew is already crowded. But if the book feels, at times, unfocused, it is also enjoyable and impressive on every page. Mozley brings Soho to clanging life.
... this lively story of class conflict in contemporary London offers more evidence of Mozley’s talent and versatility, marking her as a writer whose work promises both thoughtful entertainment and surprises ... Mozley subtly wires these characters and others, including a semiretired mob enforcer, a modestly successful actor and an ex-drug addict whose disappearance heightens police pressure on the district, into a complex network of unpredictable and intriguing connections ... Whether the scene is a déclassé Mayfair men’s club or a fetid cellar that affords refuge for a collection of homeless people, Mozley brings her diverse settings to life, as well as the clashing desires and ambitions of her colorful characters. Hot Stew’s title is an apt one, as Mozley consistently stirs in tasty ingredients and exciting spices, and keeps raising the temperature all the way to its startling climax.
Since reading [her] accomplished debut, I’ve been eager to discover what this talented young writer would do next. The answer? Something completely different but no less sensational ... Part of the delight of the novel is having the feeling of dropping in on these characters for a few intense hours, followed by gaps of a few months that yield great change, or none at all ... How these themes manifest themselves continually surprise the reader but give the novel a sense of unity and structure that extends beyond its geographic setting ... It also is worth noting that, despite the seriousness of its themes, Hot Stew is a very funny book. Mozley’s sly observations and clear affection for many of her characters combine to create a novel that is nothing less than a joy to read.
... stunningly clever ... Mozley's vision of London, simultaneously ancient and deeply modern, is layered with mystery (pieces of which are perhaps too neatly solved) and packed with humanity — a deliciously spicy stew indeed.
Mozley is adept at detailing this tricksy duality ... Mozley’s writing often takes on a lyrical, almost fairytale quality ... Hot Stew’s many separate strands and characters are linked in both explicit and less obvious ways. Some of this is very clever and some of it is a bit clunky, even worthy. No matter — the story moves so quickly, and ranges so widely, that there is no time to dwell — either as a reader or in this review ... The novel climaxes in a single violent afternoon that has been prefigured by the rumblings throughout the novel. It’s one ending, but London is never finished. Much later, when Precious travels by bus to a public inquiry into the events of that day, 'she sees London whirling past like a magic lantern'. It’s a wonderful image, and one that sums up Mozley’s messy, fantastical vision of this beloved city.
Hot Stew is interested in property and wealth. Unfortunately, it is a little ham-fisted. The brothel is depicted as a quaint bastion of old Soho, while Agatha’s villainy is signposted, or rather billboarded, through lazy stereotypes ... Mozley’s discussion of sex work is more intriguing ... this sharp social commentary rubs up against a series of storylines that vary from the limp to the crass ... What could be an insightful exploration of London’s homelessness conundrum instead shows them as members of a gaggle of vagrants who gather underground and root through the earth for trinkets ... a bolshy, readable, and sometimes astute novel, but ultimately its mode of relentless caricature simply bounces off the real place without leaving a dent. My daily eight-minute walk from Oxford Circus to my workplace in Soho takes me past four artisan coffee shops, three Prets, an alleyway of sex shops, shiny office blocks and a house where the Venetian painter Canaletto once lived. Soho is strange and multifarious enough as it is; I’m not sure we need this souped-up take on it.
A large cast of characters, from struggling actors to an aging mob hitman and underemployed millennials, populates this novel in which Mozley revisits themes of property and land ownership from her first, Elmet (2017), sometimes struggling to weave these characters’ aspirations into a relevant whole. Extraneous descriptions and style deviations detract from the plot’s more noble central focus, while a few characters seem less than relevant to the story. Nevertheless, this is a passionate and bruising take on the side effects of an increasingly unequal world, in which the rich and the poor function on alarmingly separate if parallel planes.
... can be read as a call to arms to society’s marginalised against the homogenisation of London’s most colourful neighbourhoods, a washing out of its messy character in place of sanitised comfort ... Mozley brings to light the depth and character of Soho’s history, holding it next to its potential future of being washed of all personality in favour of expensive housing and upscale restaurants ... the excitement and seediness of sex work make for a telling and titillating story, and by washing out the politics and leaving only the feather boas and Venetian masks with no mention of sex workers’ organising against criminalisation, Mozley is able to gentrify the mentality of sex work. Her book criticises gentrifying class wars within Soho, but Mozley’s own part in these phenomena cannot go uncritiqued. Her dumbing down and smoothing over of sex worker history is part of the gentrification process. She takes the story of sex worker survival, removes its messy history and real lived experiences, and makes it palatable for a fresher, cleaner audience. She highlights and critiques the gentrification process, and she then reinforces it ... in Mozley’s three hundred page novel, there is not a single sentence about the state apparatus that facilitates these evictions: criminalisation. None of the characters mention it, even though the book brings to light structural factors of displacement...et Mozley does not interrogate the fight for legal change and she erases the groups behind the sex worker movement while keeping their images for her book ... Mozley is aware of the politics and history yet chooses to look away. If literary gentrification is not already a term, it should be: Mozley has actively displaced the characters who made this story, to move into the area and retell the story herself. The suffering and trauma that sex workers fight against has, in her writing, become what Sarah Schulman describe as a vague unknowable ... A couple of my friends read this book at the same time as I did – between us we have over 50 years in sex work and activism – and it made for uncomfortable seeing our efforts reduced to a messy, and inaccurate, storyline. Mozley’s representations depoliticise a deeply political action ... sex workers and their community, insufficiently fleshed out, and lacking idiosyncrasy and humanity, become photocopies of photocopies: tired tropes we encounter time and again in the media. They use language which real sex workers retreat from ... Sex workers deserve better than being used as props in a story about gentrification, with their truth removed to make it more enjoyable for unfamiliar audiences. While I defend a writer’s right to tell any story they want, including about marginalised communities, I do think an element of research and accountability is needed for a finished book to be authentic. Sex workers are a secretive and intruigng subject matter, but tropes and mimic representations of them are more welcome than the people themselves. In Hot Stew Fiona Mozley has packaged up sex work into a prurient story about Soho, stripping it of all history and politics, and in doing so become every bit the gentrifier her book critiques.
Through a sizable cast of characters and references to Soho's origins, the author conjures up the notorious London village in all its seedy glory, now awash not only with the sex industry, drinking holes, and crime, but also upscale developments and a more stylish, younger crowd ... Mozley’s focus is more on her web of interconnected characters than events. And while themes of human trafficking, violence, and depravity seam the narrative, relationships and conversations dominate, sometimes a weakness when central figures can seem two-dimensional and peripheral ones lack definition. Cheryl’s transfiguration in the bowels of the city adds a surreal, dreamlike quality to a loose, witty, soapy story that, even while reaching toward cataclysmic events, retains gentle detachment ... A long, empathetic vision of place and people is delivered with wide context but less pungency than its title implies.
With tinges of Tom Jones, this is a seriously entertaining romp through one of London’s most historic districts, alongside a band of resilient have-nots who are determined to win out over an entitled heiress.
[A] lively contemporary Dickensian outing set in a Soho brothel ... Of greater concern to the author than the fate of the building and its residents, though, are the social problems of poverty, addiction, and rising gentrification, which she roundly illustrates through depictions of the myriad men who frequent the brothel ... Unfortunately, the main characters are often flatly reported and fail to leave a deep impression ... Still, Mozley’s ambition and vision make this a worthy effort.
