On Lou Mathews’s “L.A. Breakdown”

FULL DISCLOSURE: I hate street racing, especially and all the more since the midnight donut spinners discovered my street. The noise is a health hazard, their idea of thrills primitive, and the level of danger they’ve added to L.A. driving detestable. What then, you might ask, prompted me to read the recently reissued 1999 novel L.A. Breakdown, Lou Mathews’s tale of street racing set in the late 1960s? The answer is a tremendous fondness for his second published book of fiction, Shaky Town, a 2021 love letter to the working-class underdogs of Los Angeles’s Eastside barrio, around the 1980s. That collection of linked stories was filled with fondly rendered characters, gentle humor, occasionally transcendent imagery, and deft transitions that might go from a sun “flattening to an egg before dropping below the mountains” to doctors debating a mother’s tumor. In Shaky Town, Mathews’s literary tires were fully inflated, and he was firing on all cylinders.