The Magician's Assistant

Ann Patchett

The first thing you notice when reading The Magician's Assistant is that Ann Patchett really cares for her characters. She quietly nurtures them, even the minor ones, and offers the reader a gentle yet revealing view of their complex lives.

At the opening of the novel, Parsifal the magician, has suddenly died and Sabine, his assistant of twenty years and recently his wife, is trying to cope with her loss. Their relationship had always been a unique one - Sabine loved him and dedicated her life to him despite his inability to love her in the same way: he was gay. What complicates her grief is the discovery that Parsifal has family living in Nebraska - a mother and two sisters - family he had always told her died many years earlier in an accident. In fact, everything she knows about the history of his life, turns out to be a fabricated story. As Sabine struggles to comprehend the reasons for Parisfal's deceptions, she embarks on an emotional journey, traveling to Nebraska to try and connect with the Parsifal she never knew through the family she never knew he had.

Patchett effectively uses two elements throughout the book that bind this story together: the dream world and the world of magic. Descriptions of Sabine's dreams, where she reunites with Patchett as well as his gay lover Phan, are used to relate Sabine's emotional awakenings as she forms relationships with Parsifal's family and learns of his early life; the magic that Parsifal and Sabine performed throughout their union serves as the tool that brings Parsifal's family an understanding of the son/brother they lost years ago.

Lovingly written and gracefully rendered, The Magician's Assistant is a deceivingly simple book and a very rewarding experience.