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THE PRIZE, by Irving Wallace (768 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $5.95). "Truth and honesty," proclaims Irving Wallace, are the pure, white lights that guide his path as a novelist. The Chapman Report concerned the sexual shenanigans of a band of interviewers and interviewees taking part in a Kinsey-like study, and brought him fame and $250,000 so far from the American rights alone, including a Hollywood sale. But Wallace insists that sincerity was the mark of his bedside manner. He says that he recoils when people stare at him as if they saw on his face "the leer of a sex-mad ogre, and worse, far worse, the bloated, unnatural look of the crass commercialist." In his latest example of sincere sex, for which he has already received $320,000 from his publisher and MGM, Wallace has sportingly given himself a heavy handicap: his subject is the men and women who win the Nobel Prize, but Wallace's intellectual giants have feet of such soft clay that they find it difficult to stay upright for longer than a chapter.

They tumble into bed with all the verve of the casual Californians in The Chapman Report.

One scene sets the mood. A French chemist has just begun to make love to his mistress, a Balenciaga model, of course, when the phone jangles on the bedside table. On the wire is his wife, also a chemist, who utters a line for the ages: "Pull your pants on and come home.

The press is on its way--we've just won the Nobel Prize." THE CONVERSIONS, by Harry Mathews (182 pp.; Random House; $3.50). This first novel by a young poet is an ambitious montage of word play, newspaper lists and fantasies: it all hangs together after a fashion, but some of the pieces might better have stood alone. The main story line concerns the hero's search for the significance of an ancient adze, but some of the meanderings are more interesting. The rapt admirers of a Spanish bullfighter receive stigmata-like wounds in whatever part of the body their hero is gored. A New York gangster discovers that certain cactus spines are powerfully narcotic; one day he falls into a truckload of the cacti, is impaled on the spines, and dies of an overdose. In a strangely gripping passage, Mathews describes a heaven from which God has been banished. Its inhabitants run things as they did on earth; the rich and powerful are welcomed, the poor and weak are persecuted. Mathews deftly turns everyday life into a lurid nightmare. His symbolism is brilliant in fragments, but it spreads through the novel like crab grass and tends to choke the narrative.

THE GOLDEN RENDEZVOUS, by A/isfair MacLean (301 pp.; Doubleday; $3.95).

If Hollywood did not have Gregory Peck, it would be madness to think of converting this novel into a movie. Alistair MacLean's heroes are not only larger than life--they are a sort of flea's-eye view of the Colossus at Rhodes. An earlier book that MacLean sold to the movies was The Guns of Navarone.

The present colossus is the first officer of a British passenger-cargo ship that is hijacked in the Caribbean by desperate Latinos who wear beards and berets but are not called Cubans. The desperadoes intend to intercept another vessel which is bringing back from Europe some of the gold that has lately been flowing out of Fort Knox. First Officer Carter is soon up to his stripes in heroism. With three bullet holes in his leg, he. dangles over the side of the ship, plops into the water, is dragged along at twelve knots through hurricane seas while he hunts for another rope, then shinnies up the side and really goes into action. Storyteller all the way, MacLean as a stylist might well be cat alogued as a writer, haggard. His dialogue runs to lines like "There's mayhem and murder aboard." His plot is both grippingly suspenseful and patently ridicu lous, but ends with a supratitanic bang.

THE SHAPES OF SLEEP, by J. B. Priest ley (215 pp.; Doubleday; $3.75). "I've had to act a character out of an American paperback," says Ben Sterndale. "In my room there should be a blonde with a bottle of bourbon." Ben is the tender-tough hero of a new British hardbound --a lighthearted attempt at mystery writing by famed Englishman of Letters J. B.

Priestley. As it happens, the blonde is waiting, but not with bourbon. From the time when she sandbags Ben with a gin bottle wrapped in a face towel until they fall into a clinch at the fadeout, it is hard to tell if the author is serving up good bottled-in-James Bond stuff or just trying to provide Spillane with another mickey.

More nearly, the former.

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