RUFUS, RED RUFUS

This supposedly takes place on a present day University of California campus but the whole scene and everyone in it comes on more like the shoddiest old-time Hollywood varsity drag. In the beginning Rufus, an Irish setter, is anonymously donated to red-haired David McCormick, a freshman famous for such mad collegiate pranks as making green footprints on the library wail and zooming through a lecture hall on a skateboard, wearing long underwear and waving a checkered flag. When McCormick is expelled for dropping a rubber chicken on the visiting governor, Rufus is homeless, and the rest of the book traces his course from pillar (an upstanding graduate student from Africa) to post (under the house of a professor's teenaged daughter) and on. . . until McCormick's younger brother arrives on campus to take over where David left off. Occasionally we get Rufus' view of things -- mostly the smells of his various shelters and caretakers and how he doesn't like this latest yard -- but unfortunately he proves to be no more interesting or intelligent than the humans he's involved with.