Shaky Town: A Novel

by Lou Mathews

Overview

In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a timeless novel of working-class Los Angeles. A former mechanic and street racer, he tells his story in cool and panoramic style, weaving together the tragedies and glories of one of L.A.’s eastside neighborhoods. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war to a priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous faultline but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.

Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Pat Barker’s Union Street, Shaky Town is the story of complicated, conflicted, and disparate characters bound together by place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781735303802
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	08/24/2021
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lou Mathews is the author of L.A. Breakdown and a longstanding instructor at UCLA Extension’s acclaimed Creative Writing program. His stories have been published in ZZZYVYA, New England Review, Tin House, Black Clock, Paperback L.A., and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, former restaurant critic, and passionate cook. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and an NEA Fiction Fellowship, and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award.

Read an Excerpt

When I retired, I decided I should be the Mayor here because I have seniority. I moved here in 1922. I was five years old. Nobody else has lived here longer. Mrs. Espinosa will argue with you, but I can remember when she moved here. It was 1928. Before that she lived in Frogtown. She counts that, but Frogtown is across the tracks.

That doesn’t count. This is Shaky Town.

I’ll tell you how long I’ve been here. After the earth-quake in 1923, when the dam broke, this street was flooded to the tops of the trees. Right where we’re sitting, I floated over it on a raft, in 1923. I tied that raft to an orange tree, right across the street. There was a whole grove then, where the pallet factory is now.

So you’re learning what a wonderful barrio you live in. Historical. That bakery was built in 1930, and Shaky Town has smelled good ever since. That drive-in opened in 1945. It’s the best example of Streamline Moderne architecture in California.

I come down at night sometimes just to look at it. It’s beautiful, all lit up, the carhops on roller skates, and the windmill blades turning.

I bring a copita of brandy and sit here across the street and sip, and I think, Emiliano, you’re just like the Quixoté. He had his windmills and you have yours. Only yours have neon lights!

That’s enough history for one day. You should know about where you live. Now you get to go to work and you’ve learned something. Don’t laugh. You should learn some-thing new every day. It’s like the bankers say, Pay yourself first. Put something into savings before you pay your bills. Here comes your bus.

Editorial Reviews

06/28/2021

Mathew’s vibrant if uneven novel in stories (after L.A. Breakdown) tours a 1980s East Los Angeles neighborhood through the varied perspectives of its residents. Emiliano Gomez, the self-proclaimed “mayor” of Shaky Town who claims to have lived there since 1922, once worked as a carpenter for MGM, but was fired for drinking. In “Crazy Life,” Emiliano’s niece Dulcie convinces her boyfriend, Jesús “Chuey” Medina, to get out of a drive-by shooting rap by testifying against his friend “Sleepy” Chavez. Chuey ends up a junkie and is later murdered by Sleepy’s little brother. In “Dona Anita,” Emiliano’s neighbor Mrs. Espinosa recounts Emiliano’s many family tragedies. Later, Emiliano overcomes a decadeslong rift between Mrs. Espinosa and himself and gives a speech at her 75th birthday party. Less successful are sections focused on white high school boys causing trouble and a lengthy account of a priest who loses his faith. Emiliano reappears in a brilliant personal history of Chavez Ravine involving a curse his Aunt Lupe put on Dodger Stadium that comes to fruition when Shaky Town lives up to its name with an earthquake. It’s a mixed bag, but the best pieces linger. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

One of the best books of fiction to have come out in recent memory . . . [Shaky Town] is one of those rare works that carries an assuring integrity, showing evidence of a writer who understands the bafflement that is the human condition and has the capacity to articulate inchoate sadness and hurt and anger.” —ZYZZYVA

“This novel is a particular triumph of storytelling, each installment more acute, more poignant, more revealing than the last, each story crackling with its own distinct energy and intelligence. The characters are jumpy at the margins—volatile, mournful, funny as hell—with the little-known warrens and alleyways of Los Angeles teeming all around them. Mathews is a master, and perhaps contemporary fiction’s best-kept secret.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

 

“In telling this story of the Los Angeles he’s known, served, and loved, Lou Mathews does more than add to the conversation writers have created about this city, he’s created a peerlessly detailed and empathetic work of art.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota

 

“No one writes, or maybe ever has written, as well as Mathews about the local streets and their navigations, liberations, and traps, as brilliantly demonstrated in these stories.” —Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn

 

“Shaky Town is ultimately an embrace of all the people—the respectable and the outcast, the casualties and the survivors, the sinners and the sinned against—that make up a Los Angeles at once pitiless and tender, horrible and wonderful, located in actuality and personal mythology.” —Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA

 

“In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a peerless chronicle of working-class Los Angeles, capturing his beloved hometown in all its tragedy and knuckleheaded glory. A former mechanic and eastside street racer, he illuminates daily life with the same kind of grace and authority that Leonard Gardner brought to Fat City. Mathews is the real deal, matching style with soul and reminding us what matters in this life.” —Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49

 

“With Shaky Town, Lou Mathews brings a fascinating and unforgettable corner of the real Los Angeles to vivid life, creating an authentic portrait of a time, a place, and a people. This community is no stranger to tragedy and loss, but there is much beauty, hope, and even humor in Mathew’s stories as well. His characters know what it means to endure, to survive. They have their triumphs and their struggles—yet so often in these pages, if we pay close enough attention, they are also showing us how to live.” —Skip Horack, author of The Other Joseph

 

“Mathews turns the prism of East L.A. this way and that, examining it from various perspectives. As an L.A. native, Mathews writes as an insider, giving voice to a diverse group of Angelenos spanning multiple generations and cultures. The result is greater than the sum of its parts: a panoramic vision of an alluring, deranged, rattletrap of a city . . . Remarkably alive.” —Larissa Dooley, Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher