Donald Goines Dopefiend

Donald Goines Dopefiend is a book by Donald Goines about a drug dealer who sells really good heroin and is a total sex freak. It is also about some other stuff like drug heists, addiction, prostitution, losing jobs and family over drug habits, stealing, dealing with cops, getting murdered, murdering, rape, mental illness, suicide, and some other stuff.

It is a really good book. It’s a classic drug novel that belongs alongside books like The Basketball Diaries, Junky, Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, etc. etc.

I would argue that Dopefiend is actually a lot better than many of the books I just listed simply because Dopefiend doesn’t try to intellectualize drug habits or the people who frequent that world but instead aims to render them accurately without being pretentious. So what you end up with is a bunch of characters who feel like people you could know, even if in a lot of cases they are people you’re grateful that you don’t know.

When I was writing my novel Donald Goines, I read Dopefiend a few times. I knew that I wanted to retell that core story of Porky as this lonely and cruel demon-drug dealer who is clearly seething on the inside and outwardly torturing anyone who needs him, as I think that’s a real archetype of the drug world that other drug novels get wrong. Many drug novels, when I think about them, nail the element of drug buying and how difficult dealers can be but fail to capture how often the people who are drawn to the career of drug dealing are people with severe personality issues who mainly want to toy with people. They’re more complex than just people seeking money and in small towns especially it’s not uncommon for some sadistic bully-type people to get involved in that sort of thing. I wanted to render that type of character. But also, those sadistic bully-types are people too and deserve to be rendered thoroughly and completely.

In my book I really try to sell the drug dealer as a person with his own story and his own reasons and yeah, maybe he’s a total scumbag but he wasn’t just born that way he kind of morphed into it as life’s options seemed to dwindle and as he determined his place in society was to either be a recipient of constant psychic violence or its perpetrator. Too many big words, I promise I’ll talk more normal from here on.

I had read a number of crime/drug novels that, in hindsight, I think were based on Daniel Goines’s relatively unique approach to writing a novel. Here are a few similarities I noticed between them and then I will delve into which I chose to keep when writing my contemporary magical realism version of that.

They all use third person omniscient perspective, meaning they narrate from above the characters and don’t use first person thought statements like “I wanted to kill him and stuff his head in the freezer but I worried what Larry would think,” and instead opt for, “Joe wanted to kill him and stuff his whole body in a suitcase to see if it would fit but he wasn’t sure if Larry would balk at that.” This allows an author to really get all the characters figured out and share them with a reader, which is cool, and is kind of necessary for the type of books that Goines and his many students would implement in their writing. But it also comes with a whole bunch of problems.

The main problem with third person omniscient is it removes all the tension from the writing. We know Joe wants to stuff the unnamed guy’s body parts in fridges or suitcases or whatever so we’re just kind of on board. We also know that Larry maybe wouldn’t like that or we know that Joe thinks that. But we didn’t see any of this. We didn’t come to realize these aspects of the characters, were were just told how shit was, which is boring. A writer like Goines does a great job of compensating for this by creating a wily cast of characters so full of life and fear and desire that we just let it go because we want to come along for the ride but the books would be better if he could get around that and let us sort of grok what the characters want through their action.

This is a major difference between Goines and my own Goines-influenced novel, Donald Goines by Calvin Westra. In my book I keep it very limited and switch between perspectives. We enter a character’s head from time to time but really only one in any given chapter and I work hard to keep it as limited as possible. We sometimes are in the pig’s head, sometimes Dunie’s, sometimes Honduran Emerald, and to a much lesser extent we follow Great Indian Bustard and Kagu. In draft six there was a single scene where we entered Orange Bellied Parrot’s head but I felt like that wasn’t very effective, to have just one scene like that and so I reworked it to be from Honduran Emerald’s perspective, as readers would already be used to being in Honduran Emerald’s head.

I am a firm believer in third person limited, which is what the approach to perspective I just described is technically called. In third person limited, a writer allows the narrative to study the inner workings of a character but only one at a time. If it is going to study a second character’s interiority, it has to be a different section or chapter. Two major examples of this in use would be Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George R. R. Martin.