L.A. Breakdown (Deluxe Edition)

“In his elegiac tale of illegal street racing in the late ’60s, Mathews captures the essence of working-class Los Angeles. This is the beautiful and uncompromising work of a native son, an eastside hood who knows the score. In L.A. Breakdown, Mathews offers up a love letter to doomed knuckleheads everywhere.” —Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of AMC’s Lodge 49

“Deftly captures the mood of mid-1960s Los Angeles and the waning days of one of its signature subcultures: drag racing . . . Like so many tales of this thoroughly mined era, L.A. Breakdown moves ineluctably toward both the loss of innocence and the recruitment center: The shadow of Vietnam is, understandably, ever present. But 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 (December 5, 1999)

“What Lou Mathews delivers here is the perfect ethnography of Los Angeles hot rod worship culture in its golden era. His people are the errant working-class knights of the stylized tournaments of street drag racing and the drive-in damsels they adore and neglect, often in about the same breath. The way they talk is dazzling—funny and heart-rending by turns—and always completely real feeling. Among his other great gifts, Mathews possesses an ear as original as Harold Pinter’s or David Mamet’s.” —Carter Wilson, author of Crazy February and Treasures on Earth

“Mathews brings this world to life in vivid detail, capturing the bittersweet twilight of a subculture.” —Publishers Weekly (August 16, 1999)

“Having grown up in the Valley myself in the fifties and sixties, remembering well the Bob’s Big Boy and the Van de Kamp’s, and having even cruised Van Nuys Boulevard even as I was never part of the culture Lou Mathews has caught so evocatively, I nonetheless can attest to how well he caught the feel of the landscape—the way there seemed to be big voids in the psychology of the geography, voids into which you could drive your life, sometimes to dead ends, sometimes off psychic cliffs, as Mathews’ characters have done. But just as impressive to me, really, is the array of vivid characters whose destiny seems both defined and betrayed by their wheels—the juxtaposition, for instance, of Reinhard’s ‘fastest flathead Ford in Tulsa’ with a future that just naturally seems fated for incarceration of one sort of another—as well as the developing nuances of all their relationships—Fat Charlie’s parallel bonds with Donna and Connie, each trumping the other in some telling way, all while a world of upheaval seeps in around the edges and washes away all the meanings and codes of an experience shared in common for the last time. L.A. Breakdown is a very skillful and assured piece of work, moving and insightful and observant.” —Steve Erickson, author of Arc d’X, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Zeroville