White Dog

Both a personal memoir and a French novelist's encounter with American reality, White Dog is a portrait of racism and hypocrisy. Set in the tumultuous Los Angeles of 1968, Romain Gary's story begins when a German shepherd strays into his life. A lost police canine, this "white dog" has been programmed to respond violently to the sight of a black man, and Gary's attempts to deprogram it - like his attempts to protect his wife, the actress Jean Seberg; like her endeavors to help black activists; like his need to rescue himself from the "predicament of being trapped, lock, stock and barrel within a human skin" - lead from crisis to grief. Using his adopted dog as a metaphor for American racism, Gary develops a domestic crisis into a full-scale social allegory.