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Money, power, love, art and sex work make up the 'Hot Stew' of Fiona Mozley’s new novel

Steph Cha
Special to USA TODAY

Fiona Mozley’s debut novel, "Elmet," shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, was a brilliant book with a savage energy, told by a single, captivating first-person narrator. Her follow-up, "Hot Stew" (Algonquin, 320 pp., ★★★ stars out of four), exhibits an entirely different skill set.

Mozley leaves the rural landscape of "Elmet" for the dynamic urban symphony of London’s Soho: “It is a noisy neighbourhood and anyone who lives in Soho must quickly learn to organise sounds into layers of importance and proximity." With masterful prose, through over a half-dozen point-of-view characters, she 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.

The central conflict is an eviction battle between the landlord and tenants of an old Soho walk-up. The landlord is Agatha Howard, the ruthless, paranoid sixth daughter and sole heir of a gangster turned real estate magnate, a man who impregnated her mother – a Russian immigrant teenager – in his 70s and died believing he’d finally sired a son.

"Hot Stew," by Fiona Mozley.

The tenants are the women who live and work in the building, running an independent brothel on their own terms. They are led by Precious, a smart, practical sex worker with strong political instincts. She and her cohort – including Tabitha, a former sex worker who serves as Precious’ maid, assistant, roommate, best friend, and partner – campaign to stay in their building, resisting the crushing pressure of Agatha’s wealth and influence.

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In the basement are several unofficial tenants – a group of destitute Londoners, many of them suffering from addiction or mental illness. They are, like the women of the brothel, neighborhood characters who frequent the Aphra Behn, the pub down the street from the walk-up. The pub is a gathering place for the people of Soho, including an aging ex-thug who once worked for Agatha’s father and now patronizes Precious, as well as his long-time drinking companion, an actor who feels ambivalent about his big break as a brutal brothel owner on a fantasy show riddled with sexual violence.

Elsewhere in London, a young Cambridge graduate from a rich family dreams about his ex-girlfriend, a woman who came from a humbler background and had fewer choices than he did, both during and after college.

Author Fiona Mozley.

There’s a lot going on in this sprawling, ambitious novel, but one unifying theme is the heavy hand of dumb luck – the transformative power of chance encounters, the capricious distribution of privileges at birth. 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: “the pulsing of human footsteps, rubber wheels scuffing tarmac, pencils being dropped, hammers striking nails, knives and cleavers landing on chopping boards, mugs of hot coffee clunking on tables, bums on seats, bodies on beds."

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