Donald Goines: An Exciting Alternative to Other Novels

by Calvin Westra

Donald Goines is a book about drugs. Donald Goines is a book about friendship. Donald Goines is a book about collecting cans and taking them to Cans where you get a nickel per can. Donald Goines is a book about rare birds and their Chikamatsu adaptations. Donald Goines is a book about being at Tacos but not wanting tacos because you’ve had tacos a lot lately. Donald Goines is a book about growing up. Donald Goines is a book about what you can learn to live with.

Genres: Fiction

183 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2022

Reviews

[Kelby Losack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious, rhythmic, and surreal in interesting and sometimes disturbing ways. The bird puppets and the super fat drug dealer who loves his bird too much and the Donald Goines branding and Dunie and that ending are my favorite parts of a book full of favorite parts. I narrated the audiobook and it's one of my most proud vocal performances and some of the most fun I've had recording something.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think my teenager is illiterate, because they kept asking why I was reading a book called Donald Glover.

[Ted Prokash]

I can yell you what: you are GOINES to love this book! I mean, despite a lot of shady GOINES on in Westra's story, you will have a keen, bang-up time reading what is surely whatever passes for a masterpiece in this idiotic time we live in. Now I'm not GOINES to keep beating a dead horse here but... oh what the hell, whack, whack, THWACK! this is a good book! There is drug abuse, stupidity, tropical birds, every damn thing you ever wanted in a book. In fact, I'm GOINES to have to stop there... I like this book so much I feel a stirring in my GOINES area that I need to take care of post-haste!

[Christopher Lesko · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had so much fun reading this book. Laughed every time about the Donald Goines brand stuff. Thanks be to Kelby Losak (one of my fav indie authors) for posting about doing the audio book narration because I might have missed this book. I read the kindle version though—haha—only because I’m not signed up for audio books yet. Another cool thing I liked before reading a single word was recognizing the Sam Pink cover art. Probably would have read it based off that alone. Then I read what the book was about and kinda worried it might be too crazy for me. Like maybe so inane I’d lose track and get bored right away, regret spending $2.99 when I could have gotten a couple tacos instead. lol. So I “Looked Inside” and instantly knew I’d dig it. Seemed chill with the loose, simple prose and short chapters. Even the marionettes and sock puppets the dudes play with was weird/cool in Harmony Korine-like way. The drug stuff had a neat twist too. Made it more original, interesting, fun. Yeah, hell yeah.

[Ryan Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine Napoleon Dynamite was directed by Harmony Korine then that movie was adapted into a novelization by Sam Pink. That’s kind of what Donald Goines is. Donald Goines is a thrilling alternative to the typical boring best seller.

It’s Zebras tier shit.

[Nanci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Goines is a quick and highly enjoyable read, in part, because Westra moves from scene to scene masterfully, never lingering for too long. In fact, sometimes I wished we could stay longer, but that’s only because the world of Donald Goines is so engrossing.

The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny; for a moment, we almost forget we’re watching young lives unravel. The characters are a doomed yet familiar spectacle, surrounded with a comical absurdity real life rarely matches. And if we’re willing to be shallow for a moment, we know they’re all inferior to us, and perhaps that’s another, more inconspicuous reason why the story doesn’t feel as devastating as it could. There’s something sad about that personal reflection, too.

This tension is what makes the novel so breezy yet captivating. The devastation unfolds quietly but is never hidden from us. In just 215 pages — and with generous white space my tired eyes appreciate — Westra recreates the feeling an average life often has: a quiet, removed sadness that always has the potential to become tragic.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feel like I might've missed some of the nuances due to having never read Donald Gaines (the author.) Gonna read "Dopefiend" and possibly come back to this. It was still a very enjoyable read, very surreal. Really enjoyed Westra's sense of humor in both this book and "Family Annihilator". RIYL Donald Goines (the author), Donald Goines (the soft drink), exotic birds, puppetry, and driving around in a jumper to buy drugs from an impossibly fat drug dealer.

[sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

really good. like really.

"lovely" is decidedly not the word for it, though it's often the one I fall back on to describe books I enjoy. this was more like whipping your thigh with a long, thin stick: driven first by curiosity: struck, then, by it's sharpness; cataloging, somewhat distantly, a kind of pleasure,--not itself pleasant--perhaps born of interest and deviation from normal experience but going well beyond that; worth carrying on for those same reasons; ending with a lingering sting that in no way makes you regret the undertaking, if only because you know something now that you didn't before.

distinct from that overwrought analogy -- it was really fucking funny and brimming with sympathy for each of its characters, even those that lurked at the margins of the main narrative.

big ups to Pete for the loan :))

[justin louie · Rating 5 out of 5]

great bleak and weird drug novel that isn't insufferable as hell with some asshole "i've seen it all, man" dipshit protag but feels real and bizarre like real life and has its own purposeful rhythms, killer plot, etc

[Darío · Rating 5 out of 5]

Otra vez el estilo de Calvin Westra me emociona más que casi cualquier otro autor que haya leído

[crowjonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Goines.




jk, I’ll say more. Calvin did a really good job! It’s clear how much care went into fleshing it out, shaping it, and sharpening it. This book is bizarre and funny and unsettling but also a little bit tender. I feel like Calvin lets us see his heart. The drug stuff made me queasy, and I think it was meant to. When it’s described, I can’t help but imagine slicing cuts in my own arms in order to shove bits of illicit clay into the wounds, or chewing glass on the hunch that it would feel good. I liked the status marker of receiving subsidized school lunches, and the recurring preoccupation with how people are or aren’t set up for “success” by being read to and fed breakfast as kids.

[Worth Car · Rating 5 out of 5]

“‘Seems obvious what we do,’ Kakapo said. And you would be right to think it wasn’t particularly obvious.”

Deceptively simple. Extremely easy to read. Ticks most of my boxes: grimy, gory, drug fueled, funny, depressing etc. I can’t quite put my finger on it , but the book is meta in a way that isn’t too in your face. I say this about every book but I need to read it more times. It’s definitely something that has inspired a drive to create within me, which I can’t say about most books. Worth the read if you have a stomach.

[David Catney · Rating 5 out of 5]

very happy to have read this donald goines brand book. it truly is an exciting alternative to other novels.

[brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt like I was there

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disaster that you absolutely can not look away from

Westra eschews the constraints of conventional narrative structure, opting instead for arbitrary chapter breaks, clipped prose, and total lack of physical descriptions and resolution. His characters are often relentless in their quest for self immolation, and have few (if any) redeeming qualities—and yet, you can’t help but root for them. A stark depiction of the hopelessness of addiction, Donald Goines is a disaster that you absolutely can not look away from.

[TK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gnarly, unrepentant piece of [not so] alt modern degeneracy. Slick prose and high concept. Never reaching for language or metaphor. The plot was masterly wrought. Very fine work from this author; feels like they are capable of quite a lot. Honestly, this novel is an enviable work. Look forward to more.

God bless ExPat.

“Always smile when the pusher speaks.” - DG

[Alannah Guevara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to be known as Christmas frigatebird

I am straightedge and I find reading Calvin Westra's "Donald Goines: An Exciting Alternative to Other Novels" is an exciting alternative to taking drugs. This Donald Goines story even includes interesting events and memorable characters.

[Mike Nagel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. Strange. Weirdly tender. A book that follows its own rules. Loved every page.

[David Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whole time, I ain’t even gon lie, when the pig was about to make shordie f**k on the human-sized exotic bird, I had to put the book the down, shake my head, smile wistfully and say to myself, “Classic, Calvin Westra!”

[Stanley Merkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic! God bless Mr. Donald Goines.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drugs, loitering at Cigarettes, jumpers out of gas, getting sent to Bars. A weird drug haze of a fever dream.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing novel. Balances brutality with delight, fun and hilarious and scorched earth and doomed, a stylistic wonder, knows all the 'rules' and crushes their skull laughing. A deep novel with no moralizing. I was in awe, surprised every other page or so by some new element, some new turn that revealed the characters and their world. Pulled me in right away and whenever I wasn't reading it I was thinking about it and excited to get back into its world. The description on the publisher's website has a part that reads like this: "a drug novel styled as an insanely cracked cartoon." I just wanted to say, this novel is so beautiful, so harrowing, it rises so far above a cartoon, sinks so much lower than a cartoon, we are in other far more powerful territory. This is real life abstracted, all of it grounded in reality, but the screws come loose and the characters gone astray into some mutated, melted, forever altered way, and we are made to feel the same way, our screws come loose, us on the same journey as the characters. That's the real heart of the book, how the novel follows along with characters we grow to love more and more as the pages fly by. Characters who are extremely well rendered and defined with minimal brushstrokes, who it's almost impossible not to think about as 'our friends' by the end of the story. And we feel sorry for them, and we feel sorry for ourselves, and it's all so moving, in the same way some of my other favorite books are moving.

Part of the joy is going in cold to this novel, discovering what is what, who is what, why the characters are that way (partly that way anyway), so I won't spoil anything. Even reading the publisher's blurb on their site about the book is something I would recommend avoiding. But I'll say this, the novel opens up with a boyfriend taking their girlfriend to a house to acquire drugs but the hitch is the drug dealer always takes his penis out and masturbates in front of whoever is buying. This isn't a transgressive novel however. The drug dealer will pull his penis out many many times and masturbate but that is as far as we'll go down the 'not for the squeamish' path. There are other scenes depicting slight mutilation of one's self to put drugs into the flesh. I say this because the novel has so much light and love and searches for the dignity in all the characters. Dignity. This is at its core a novel about dignity. Don't be put off by dark subject matter (a mirror held up at society), Calvin Westra has an elegant design going on, the plot and its people reach for full expression and get there imho. Highly recommended.

[Ryan Bry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Goines is the kind of book that will leave you with a "what the fuck did I just read?" feeling in the most pleasant way possible. It brings about this alternate reality scenario that's obviously bonkers but when you think about what it's really doing, what it's really trying to do it becomes brilliant in your mind. The characters in this book have clearly internalized their world to such a degree that it makes you question how much you've internalized this world that we live in, and why. As you read and start to mix sessions with reality and this, it will start to seem more plausible, what Calvin Westra is saying. That the expression of the universe during this life is like an existentialist friendly nightmare and that tenderness is the most healthy response. This stuff is potent, and it can give you a highly sensitized feeling, but it's very easy to glide off the character's personalities into micronarrative. The donald goines element that recurs provides an anomalous reference that tethers the book nicely to secondary space. The ending is the only thing I'm not sure about, not passing judgment, just am unsure about—because it puts you in there and cuts you off and doesn't explicit what takes place at the end of a world, so you can feel that missing out feeling but I have the feeling that this is what historians will be talking about as the future unfolds so all the credit goes to Calvin Westra for giving us something to talk about. It still makes sense, it just requires extra living work but in a sense that's all we can really do for each other. Thanks for writing this book, Calvin, its world kept me company when things could have drove me crazy instead. You're the best and you keep getting better, from Ryan.

[Toilet Sweat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Donald Goines! Donald Goines! Isn’t that a funny name? Seriously, say that name 5 times fast and try not to bust a gut. Whoever wrote this joke book belongs in a circus because he’s a regular Donald Goines LMAO sorry I couldn’t help myself it's just so ppfffftttt dOnALd GOiNeS LMFAOROFLCOPTER

Look, the cover’s by SAM PINK! No no, you’re thinking of Dodge Charger Mall Cop. I’m talmbout the other internet tough guy. You know what they say: always always always judge a book by the clout of its cover artist. Easy peasy. 5 stars! OK, how about 4 stars. Wouldn’t want the author to go getting a big head

Ahh! Feels good to be good. I’m turning a new leaf this year. I’ve been a baad toilet, but that’s all about to change. I know you wanna see my papers so you can put me on a list and SWAT me bathroom and lock me up in GTMO forever. I’m asking you to close my case, officers. Indie lit is safe now. I'm going away to police academy next week. I look forward to working with you all.

Best,

DONALD GOIBAHAHAHA jbjkskjkjnkjrfhkrhgljrlkhnernbjdkrnjhdjkgnjkrn

:3

[Downward · Rating 5 out of 5]

a sort of Larry Clark world that is filtered through [cough cough bad word excuse me] alt lit sensibilities and weird 21st century surrealism, where drug addiction becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare. owes a lot to Tao Lin, not the least of which is naming a book based on its themes after an author who expertly depicted those themes, but also a particular sentence in here that goes something like the guy with the knife stabbed the guy without the knife that mirrors the 'the inmate with the mop assaulted the inmate without the mop' or whatever from shoplifting at American Apparel but we're all still recovering from tao Lin's influence (not a criticism, I like Lin a lot as a writer). the real trick to this book is denying us any conclusion regarding the main characters, allowing that tension to reside within us as we have to walk away from the book, knowing we were on the brink of many conflicts, retreating from them. the junkie's story is cyclical and exploitative. the story goes how we imagine it might, even if we're denied it.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"High school was all puppets and puppet-related arguments until Kagu started getting drugs."

[Graham Irvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read one book before you die, read donald goines. You’re life will never make sense until you read donald goines. Donald goines for life. Donald goines forever

[Jennifer Greidus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had this for a while. Just finished in a day. It WAS an exciting alternative.