Dog's Best Friend

PIONEER, Go HOME! (320 pp.)--Richard Powell--Scribner ($3.75).

WHAT HAS FOUR WHEELS AND FLIES? (192 pp.)--Douglass Wallop--Norton ($2.95).

Even dogs are playing the stock market these days, and only natural-born bums can lick the Government. This seems to be the deceptively modest moral of two works of humor that have infiltrated the solemn ranks of a monumentally dull publishing season.

Bangs & Kwimpers. In Pioneer, Go Home!, ex-Adman and Novelist (The Philadelphians) Richard Powell has constructed an ingratiating fable of tribal continuity in a world of paper power. The vast apparatus of modern bureaucracy can be defeated only by the semiliterate, such as the Kwimpers of Cranberry County, N.J. The Kwimpers, inbred holdouts against every progressive movement since the Revolution (they spoke Elizabethan English until the school system caught up with them), are the most disgraceful family since the Jukes and the Kallikaks went into the sociologists' black books.

The Kwimpers drive to their destiny on that modern Rosinante, the jalopy with deciduous hubcaps. They migrate to Florida and defeat it, by the simple expedient of driving to the middle of a highway that has not been officially opened and therefore does not officially exist. As successful squatters, living on fish and cunning, the Kwimpers hold off waves of governmental agents, sociologists and gangsters intent on civilizing them. Writers have loved such types, from Shakespeare's Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, who defied Elizabethan order, to Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik, whose peasant idiocy proved smarter than the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Those who would make a design for living, says Author Powell, must still contend with those who run up a shack of no design and live in it. Despite technological advances, the world will end not with a bang but a Kwimper.

Money Barks. In a similar spirit, the second of these books recalls the familiar theory that the American automobile has become less a means of transportation than a status symbol impossible to define, and lately, impossible to de-fin. Using this as a wheelbase. Author Douglass Wallop (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant) has produced a pleasant little fiction involving gadgeted and gusseted cars that are driven by a privileged group of dogs. The dogs themselves, of course, are at the mercy of the whims of the designers, i.e., the breeders. Author Wallop's protagonist is Hobbs, an English bulldog--one of the more fantastic dog designs. Hobbs owns 250 shares of General Motors common deeded to him by a Miss Galloway, "a maiden lady of honored memory and considerable wealth." Hobbs has a manservant and subscribes to the Wall Street Journal. It seems to be Wallop's idea that Hobbs and his pals--poodles, Afghans, et al.--can improve on the behavior of man and the appearance of cars. In short, money barks.

If a reader feels strongly about car design, can stomach some doggedly doggy sex interest and the book's odd dog conversation (a kind of Madison Avenue jive), he may be able to grin, once or twice, wider than his own canines. But as he wags his little tale, Satirist Wallop seems to be unaware that his bark is a great deal worse than his bite.

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