White Dog (Gary novel)

Novel by Romain Gary

White Dog, released in France as Chien Blanc, is a non fiction autobiographical novel written by Romain Gary. Originally published as a short story in Life in 1970 (9 October), the full novel was published in 1970 in French in France by Éditions Gallimard. Gary's English version of the novel was published in North America in the same year by New American Library. The novel provides a fictionalized account of Gary and his wife's experiences in the 1960s with a stray Alabama police dog trained to attack black people on sight, and their attempts to have the dog reprogrammed. Gary uses the novel as a vehicle to denounce both racism and the activists supporting African American rights, including his own ex wife Jean Seberg and Marlon Brando. He also examines whether human responses to situations, including racism, are learned social behavior and whether they can be unlearned. In 1981, it was adapted into the controversial film of the same name, in which director Samuel Fuller made various changes to the novel's story to focus more on the dog and present a more pessimistic ending than the original novel. The film's American release after negative press from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led to concerns of boycotts. Anaïs Barbeau Lavalette released a more faithful adaptation of the book in 2022.

With the use of a "flippant tone and [an] uncomfortable use of sarcasm," White Dog is Gary's dissection of the paranoia generated by both racism and classism as he juxtaposes McCarthyism American, in which there is an "obsessive sniffing out of 'subversives' and violent race riots," against the barricades and riots of France in 1968. The violence depicted also provides a discourse on revolutionary social change, as it also leads to "a new order, a new reality." Gary "excoriates American racism, black activism, and movie colony liberalism" and reflects on American race relations as a whole. He also documents his own "intolerance of intolerance that is the curse of tolerance". Through the dog, Gary examines whether a learned response can be unlearned. He also poses the question of how much freedom and uniqueness a person can claim if humans responses are indeed learned by "social indoctrination."

White Dog quickly became a bestseller in the United States after its English release. Phoebe Adams of The Atlantic felt the story was ironic, and noted that it was "presumably" true. She felt the depiction of Marlon Brando was "tartly funny" and that story as a whole served "as an excuse for Mr. Gary's comments on racial affairs in this country, a matter on which is somewhat less pessimistic than the natives and a good deal more sensible." The Globe and Mail'''s H. J. Kirchhoff considered it a "riveting, thoughtful work" that serves as a metaphor for American racism. Julien Roumette felt Romain's depiction of the racial tensions in America at the time was "meticulously reconstituted, with a realistic, even documentary, rather exceptional dimension." Julia Weldon of Harper's Magazine remarked with amusement that the events of the novel were ones that "only a Frenchman" could have found himself in. She felt the novel was a "decathlon event" in which Gary turned a "household crisis into a full scale allegory." Overall, she praised the book as a "memorable portrait of guilt and largess in black and white", noting she felt Gary had lived to "witness his own maturity" though she also wondered if he stretched the truth to "make himself a legend in his own time." Various changes were made from the original novel's story, including the removal of Gary himself and a tighter focus on the dog. Its first official American release came in December 2008 when The Criterion Collection released the original uncut film to DVD. In reflecting on the film, Fuller notes that he had known Gary before being offered the chance to direct the White Dog adaptation, and greatly admired both Gary and the novel. He wanted to have the film dedicated to Gary, who had committed suicide before the film was completed, but the studio declined. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he stated "I know [Gary would] have liked it. And he'd have been pleased because his other books (The Roots of Heaven, etc) had not done well as films." In 2022, Canadian film director Anaïs Barbeau Lavalette released the new film adaptation White Dog (Chien blanc)'', which remained more faithful to the original book.