THE LOS ANGELES TIMES 1985 BOOK PRIZE NOMINEES

The sixth annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize program takes place this year on Nov. 1. Today we publish excerpts from the five books nominated for the fiction prize.

ANITA BROOKNER, Hotel du Lac (Pantheon: $13.95)

Edith Hope, a British writer, is in a Swiss hotel trying to end, by brute separation, a love affair that has profoundly offended her circle. She will return--to her country, her love, herself--but not before an unexpected proposal has shaken her confidence :

Mr. Neville sat forward and put his hands on the table. He seemed, suddenly, somewhat younger and less controlled than usual. It had been easy to think of him as a wealthy man in his fifties, fastidious, careful, leisured, attractive in a bloodless sort of way, the kind of man who gave great thought to his way of life, a man in whom appetite might turn to some anodyne hobby, the collecting of dry-point etchings or the tracing of his family tree. The kind of man who would undoubtedly have a fine library but whom it was somehow difficult to imagine in any other room of a house.

“I think you should marry me, Edith,” he said.

She stared at him, her eyes widening in disbelief.

“Let me explain,” he said, rather hurriedly, taking a firm grip on his composure. “I am not a romantic youth. I am, in fact, extremely discriminating. I have a small estate and a very fine house, Regency Gothic, a really beautiful example. And I have a rather well-known collection of famille rose dishes. I am sure you love beautiful things.”

“You are wrong,” she said, her voice cold. “I do not love things at all.”

“I have a lot of business overseas,” he went on, ignoring her. “And I like to entertain. I am away a certain amount of the time. But I dislike having to come back to a house only occupied by the couple who live in it when I am not there. You would fit perfectly into that setting.”

A terrible silence installed itself between them. Edith concentrated her attention on the bill, fluttering unnoticed under an ashtray. When she spoke her voice was unsteady.

“You make it sound like a job specification,” she said. “And I have not applied for the job.”

ELIZABETH BENEDICT, Slow Dancing (Knopf: $15.95)

Lexi Steiner, a New Yorker transplanted to Los Angeles, is an idealistic young immigration lawyer with a growing reputation. David Wiley is a tough reporter who interviews her about her work. Both are in the fast lane. As their relationship grows, both pull over to the shoulder:

“Tell me something, Lexi.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Tell me how you ended up in L.A.”

“I went to law school in San Francisco and Nell followed me there--”

“Nell?”

“The woman I told you about. She followed me there, lived there for a few years, got bored and moved to L.A. When I graduated from law school, I followed her here. I have a feeling we’re going to keep following each other across the country.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is. Serious and mysterious.”

“Why mysterious?”

“Because the only person I’ve ever really been in love with is a woman.”

“And you never slept together.”

“I told you that four times.”

“Have you talked about it with her?”

“Sure. We talk about everything.”

She had said too much. She didn’t know how she was going to answer the question that was sure to follow.

“Did you tell her about me?”

“I haven’t talked to her today.” A moment’s respite. The truth.

“But you’ll tell her, won’t you?

“Probably. I’ll say you asked me a lot of questions. That it was very sexy.”

“Questions--sexy?”

“Sure. Don’t you think so?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Women adore it when men ask them questions. I think it’s a sex-linked trait.” David laughed. “And the other side is sex-linked too: that hardly any men ask enough questions. Although, of course, they love it when you ask them questions. But they think it only goes one way.”

JAMAICA KINCAID, Annie John (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $11.95)

Annie John is growing up on Antigua in the still - British West Indies. Before she leaves for nursing school and England, she will have broken some of the ties that bind her to her mother. But the break comes slowly. She loves her mother very much :

“When I was a small child, my mother and I used to go down to Rat Island on Sundays right after church, so that I could bathe in the sea. It was at a time when I was thought to have weak kidneys and a bath in the sea had been recommended as a strengthening remedy. Rat Island wasn’t a place many people went to anyway, but by climbing down some rocks my mother had found a place that nobody seemed to have ever been. Since this bathing in the sea was a medicine and not a picnic, we had to bathe without wearing swimming costumes. My mother was a superior swimmer. When she plunged into the seawater, it was as if she had always lived there . . . I, on the other hand, could not swim at all. In fact, if I was in water up to my knees I was sure that I was drowning. My mother had tried everything to get me swimming, from using a coaxing method to just throwing me without a word into the water. Nothing worked. The only way I could go into the water was if I was on my mother’s back, my arms clasped tightly around her neck, and she would then swim around not too far from the shore. It was only then that I could forget how big the sea was, how far down the bottom could be, and how filled up it was with things that couldn’t understand a nice hallo. When we swam around in this way, I would think how much we were like the pictures of sea mammals I had seen, my mother and I, naked in the seawater, my mother sometimes singing to me a song in a French patois I did not yet understand, or sometimes not saying anything at all. I would place my ear against her neck, and it was as if I were listening to a giant shell, for all the sounds around me--the sea, the wind, the birds screeching--would seem as if they came from inside her, the way the sounds of the sea are in a seashell. Afterward, my mother would take me back to the shore, and I would lie there just beyond the farthest reach of a big wave and watch my mother as she swam and dove.”

J. G. BALLARD, Empire of the Sun (Simon & Schuster: $16.95)

Jim--a 7-year-old English schoolboy interned as J. G. Ballard was in a Japanese prison camp outside Shanghai--preserves the sanity of his fellow prisoners by his incorrigibly boyish imagination and his unquenchable energy. As the war nears its conclusion, however, and the earth is foul with the corpses of the once-invincible Japanese, Jim nears the limits of his own sanity :

He picked the slice from his lips and stared at the oily meat. Living flesh was not meant to feed the dead. This was food that would devour those who tried to eat it. Jim spat the last shred into the grass beside the Japanese. Leaning across the corpse, he patted the blanched lips with his forefinger, ready to slip the morsel of ham into its mouth.

The chipped teeth closed around his finger, cutting the cuticle. Jim dropped the can of meat, which rolled through the grass into the canal. He wrenched his hand away, aware that the corpse of this Japanese was about to sit up and consume him. Without thinking, Jim punched the pilot’s face, then stood back and shouted at him through the swarm of flies.

The pilot’s mouth opened in a noiseless grimace. His eyes were fixed in an unfocused way on the hot sky, but a lid quivered as a fly drank from his pupil. One of the bayonet wounds in his back had penetrated the front of his abdomen, and fresh blood leaked from the crotch of his overall. His narrow shoulders stirred against the crushed grass, trying to animate his useless arms. Jim gazed at the young pilot, doing his best to grasp the miracle that had taken place. By touching the Japanese he had brought him to life; by prizing his teeth apart he had made a small space in his death and allowed his soul to return.

LOUISE ERDRICH, Love Medicine (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: $13.95)

Two families of Chippewa Indians, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, live a life in which personal boundaries are blurred by the sharing of innumerable secrets, a life in which, for example, a grandson may know of his grandparents’ unsatisfactory sexual relations and feel called upon to improve them :

So anyhow, I said to Grandma I’d give this love medicine some thought . . . I put my whole mentality to it, nothing held back. After a while I started to remember things I’d heard gossiped over.

I heard of this person once who carried a charm of seeds that looked like baby pearls. They was attracted to a metal knife, which made them powerful. But I didn’t know where them seeds grew. Another love charm I heard about I couldn’t go along with, because how was I suppose to catch frogs in the act, which it required. Them little creatures is slippery and fast. And then the powerfullest of all, the most extreme, involved nail clips and such. I wasn’t anywhere near asking Grandma to provide me all the little body bits that this last love recipe called for. I went walking around for days just trying to think up something that would work.

Well I got it. But I was sitting underneath a tree one day down near the school just watching people’s feet go by when something tells me, look up! Look up! So I look up, and I see two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life. I see them flying right over my head naturally preparing to land in some slough on the reservation, which they certainly won’t get off of alive.

It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part--say the goose heart--of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work? Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway. I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too. She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa’s gun.