All Them Dogs
A novel by Djamel White
Feral tenderness in a violent world.
My first reaction to All Them Dogs was basically: what the hell am I reading, and why am I already into it?
Djamel White drops you straight into Tony “Wardy” Ward’s Dublin - slang, gang hierarchy, old grudges, drugs, men with nicknames, men trying very hard to look dangerous. For a few pages I felt like everyone else had been given a briefing and I had somehow missed it.
And then Tony’s voice took over.
He is funny, vain, observant, volatile, ridiculous, dangerous, and much more vulnerable than he wants anyone to know. Pretty quickly I started thinking: this guy is performing hardness so intensely that there has to be something much softer and more frightened underneath.
That was when the book got me.
What looks at first like a fast, profane, violent gangster novel keeps opening into something much deeper: belonging, shame, sexuality, family damage, loyalty, masculinity, and the stories we build about ourselves in order to survive.
Tony is an absolute mess. He hurts people. He makes terrible decisions. There were many moments when my main response was simply, Tony, for the love of God.
But White never lets him become just one thing.
Every time I thought I understood Tony, the book gave me another piece of him. The lonely kid. The frightened kid. The boy who desperately wanted to matter to somebody. The man who learned to confuse being feared, needed, chosen, and used with being loved.
And the writing is much smarter than the book initially lets on.
White’s control of tone is fantastic. He can move from menace to absurd comedy to tenderness to grief without making it feel as though we’ve wandered into another novel, because Tony’s voice holds everything together. He characterizes through action and body language as much as explanation. Tiny gestures carry enormous weight. Recurring images - dogs, leashes, territory, watching and being watched - quietly accumulate meaning. Even chapter breaks become punchlines or character revelations.
And maybe my favorite thing White does is let Tony tell us one story about himself while the novel shows us another. Tony thinks he is telling us what happened. White is showing us what it means.
By the end, I wasn’t really thinking about gangsters anymore. I was thinking about what happens when an identity that once helped you survive becomes the thing that traps you.
I wasn’t excusing Tony. I just couldn’t flatten him. And honestly, that is one of my favorite things a novel can do.
Profane, propulsive, darkly funny - and deceptively smart. Feral tenderness in a violent world.
All Them Dogs will be our upcoming Off the Map discussion at Watermark - a book club for books that may take us somewhere outside our usual reading habits.
If you read it with us, come ready to talk about Tony, certainly, but also about how White builds him: voice, contradiction, body language, comic timing, recurring images, and all the things the novel shows us that Tony himself cannot quite see.
Off The Map Book Club will meet this Sunday, October 4 from 5:30-6:30 pm at Watermark Books. Please RSVP with the link below if you’d like to attend.