L.A. Breakdown (Deluxe Edition)

A 1999 LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK

DELUXE EDITION, WITH NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN RECOVERED CHAPTERS

―Los Angeles, 1967―

With gleaming detail and blinding precision, Lou Mathews freeze-frames a hidden corner of L.A.’s outlaw culture in the moments before it becomes extinct. The heart of the culture is the drive-in, where street racers meet to challenge their rivals and place their bets. This world comes to life after dark, lit by headlights and street lamps, a moveable feast of drag races, peopled with its own lost generation: young men and women who have left high school but have no thoughts of college.

Drifting from one dead end job to another, supplementing their income through thieving, doing the occasional stint in prison, and reluctantly entering the armed services when there is nothing else left, they live, and sometimes die, for the excitement, the danger, the money of racing. In the world of drag racing―fleeting and bittersweet, like the end of summer―the stakes the stakes grow higher and higher as, one by one, each player spins out and disappears from the scene:

Here, we meet Vaca, crippled in soul and body, prefers the armor of his car to a wheelchair. The ex-con Brody―Vaca’s driver―is the best street racer in town. Reinhard, a loner who has no one and nothing but the exquisite machines he builds and races. Charlie, the race organizer who tells the story. And Connie, who rolls her eyes at the whole parade, never without a sarcastic riposte, but who can’t stay away from the boys and their toys.

Stunning, bleakly beautiful, and laugh-out-loud funny, L.A. Breakdown paints a riveting portrait of 1960s Los Angeles, frozen in time yet disintegrating before our eyes with all the reckless speed of romantic era.

“Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil.” ―Los Angeles Times

Lou Mathews lives in Los Angeles below the Hollywood sign and is a fourth generation Angeleno. Married at 19, he worked his way through UC Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic and continued to work as a mechanic until he was 39. Since then he has worked as a freelance journalist, restaurant reviewer, and contributing editor at L.A. Style magazine. His journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Tin House, Mother Jones, and many other outlets―from underground newspapers and airline magazines to corporate house organs like Bob’s Big Boy Family News. Mathews has published short stories in more than forty literary quarterlies, including the New England Review, Short Story, Witness, ZYZZYVA, and seven issues of Black Clock. The stories have been included in more than ten fiction anthologies and two textbook series. He has received a Pushcart Prize, two Pushcart Special Mentions, A Best American Mystery Stories Special Mention, A Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as a California Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowships. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1989 and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards. L.A. Breakdown, Mathews’ first novel, was published in 1999, when he was 53, and it was picked as a Best Book of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. His latest novel, Shaky Town, published last year, was long-listed for the 2022 Tournament-of-Books.