Clearing the way for Pierre

Tolstoy works out some plot points, now that he's set the pieces in place for the abandonment of Moscow. It's become increasingly obvious that, one way or another, Pierre has to end up with Natasha (Pierre is the most Tolstoyan of the characters, and I read somewhere that Natasha was modeled on Madame Tolstoya). So now, it's confirmed: Prince Andrei is dead, and so is Anatole Kuragin (they die side-by-side, apparently, in the field hospital). But Pierre is still married to the vacuous but beautiful Helene. These few chapters focus on Helene's desire to divorce Pierre. She, as usual, is surrounded by admirers, including now a young foreign prince and an older courtier (neither one named, for some reason - are they based on real people?). She gets a plan mind (she carefully checks this out with a Jesuit priest whom she's also charmed) to divorce Pierre (some weird sort of annulment I guess), marry the older guy, make him happy, he'll die, then she can marry the young prince. None of this makes a great deal of sense, except to her. All of Petersburg society talks of her divorce - an amazing counterpoint to Moscow society, leaving the city to the French invaders. The one thing that might make her scheme work is that Pierre will agree to the divorce, for his own reasons.

Also read yesterday: story in the New Yorker by Jennifer Egan, Safari, one of the better stories they've run in sometime. Focuses on a family ca 1975, dad a record producer, traveling with his much younger girlfriend and to adolescent kids, others on the safari include a British ex-pat tour guide/hunter, some supposed birdwatchers, various near-celebrity musicians (clients of dad). Story is something like Atonement, centering on one event of series of closely related incidents that will reverberate, tragically, across the lives of the characters. There's material for a novel here, but oddly Egan breaks convention and in several interpolated passages tells us what happens to each of the characters throughout the longer course of their lives. But maybe this is the best way to tell this story - if it can be done effectively in a story, why stretch it out to a novel? Writers hate to squander material, but sometimes effficiency and compression is a useful strategy.