BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Chemistry Inside and Outside of the Lab : PRIZES <i> by Erich Segal</i> ; Fawcett Columbine $23.95, 480 pages

The flight between Los Angeles and Stockholm, assuming a change of planes, takes about 14 hours. With time out for dinner, that’s how long it took me to read “Prizes.” All of Erich Segal’s characters also end up in Stockholm, at least in spirit, not as tourists, of course, but to accept Nobel Prizes. That’s what this book is all about.

“Prizes” follows the adventures of a handful of brilliant scientists through their laboratories and bedrooms to that almost mythological Concert Hall in Sweden where the good guys get gold medals and cash and, as Segal would have it, the bad guys their comeuppance. No t is left uncrossed or i undotted in Segal’s tale of brains and glory. Even the innocent victim of a lifetime of tragedies is mollified at the end with a miracle.

Every major player in “Prizes” is a scientist (cameo appearances by a Hollywood harridan and an Argentine violinist notwithstanding). Perhaps the stage grew too crowded, or Segal decided to save the literature and peace prizes for another book.

Once having lined them up, Segal behaves with scrupulous even-handedness toward his players. He gives the highest IQ to his female lead, Isabel Da Costa. She is a child prodigy in California whose unsuccessful father compensates for his career failure by personally overseeing her entire education.

Not surprisingly, considering all that commitment, she validates his devotion by solving the Unified Field Theory, the problem that has bedeviled physicists since Albert Einstein.

Balancing Da Costa is Adam Coopersmith, a research doctor whose name and medical career echo Sinclair Lewis’ 1924 hero Arrowsmith. Coopersmith marries a formidable woman only to discover that her legal career is more important to her than caring for their only daughter. He leaves this woman for Anya, his true love.

Anya is a waif of an emigre who had been exploited, then dumped by her ambitious Russian husband for her inability to conceive a child.

Also in the biomedical arena is Sandy Raven, another brilliant researcher who turns out to be equally apt at business. This is just as well since he is cheated out of his rightful dues by a selfish, egocentric mentor who happens to be his father-in-law.

Segal, who did his homework visiting the laboratories of old Yale classmates, re-creates accurately the atmosphere of certain biology labs and their relationships with one another. He is familiar with the star institutions and does not stray from Harvard, MIT and Caltech for his fictional hothouses of Nobel laureates.

The literary strength of “Prizes” is Segal’s agility at juggling three separate stories without dropping a ball. As each scientist’s career confronts and then conquers obstacles, we readers are confident that the characters will eventually interact, and of course they do.

But Segal has paid a price for his dexterity by making his characters so lightweight. As he moves them through the air, he does not give them enough substance to feel or grow. Isabel Da Costa, for instance, does not seem to resent her over-protective, embarrassing father’s presence or the fact that he has compromised her childhood by depriving her of a mother.

Likewise, we find Adam Coopersmith’s ambitious wife inexplicably insensitive with no explanation except for her close relationship with her own manipulative powerful father.

Segal leaves the impression that brilliant men like Coopersmith need handmaidens rather than companions. (Where this will leave the brilliant Da Costa should she produce offspring is not explored.)

Anyone tempted to learn about science from “Prizes” will take away the notion that science works swiftly and can solve everything. Segal’s characters manage in this one Nobel year to suggest a cure for Huntington’s disease, solve a major fertility problem and, of course, resolve the unity of cosmology and particle physics.

Science isn’t like that. All problems don’t have solutions, and most prizes are given for breakthroughs along the way, for insights into processes that open new pathways to explore.

As for the “Prizes” of the title, it would have been interesting if Segal had explored just how much Nobel-mania fuels the system. He might also have included the importance of the temptation to accrue great wealth from scientific discoveries, to which one of his heroes succumbs almost accidentally.

Segal, who once taught Greek and Latin literature at Yale, is Ivy League to the tips of his word-processing fingers, so it is no surprise to find fictional echoes of the scientific scandals that rumbled through Cambridge and New Haven in the last few years.

The real scandals, of course, were more complicated and remain unresolved, and therefore more interesting. Segal ties up every loose end, leaving the reader with a wonderful description of the Nobel ceremony, and not much more.