The Magician's Assistant
- Authors: Ann Patchett
- Series:
- Type: Novel
- Genres: Literary fiction
- Rank:
- Rating: 4.1 based on 6,802 reviews
- Release Date: October 15, 1997
- Print length: 368 pages (Hardcover)
About the book
Third -- and breakthrough -- novel by an acclaimed American writer with an enchanting, quirky voice. The Magician's Assistant is at once a love story and a brilliant portrayal of reinvention about a magician who dies leaving his assistant/wife to discover he has lied about his past. A magician (with one memorable appearance on the Johnny Carson Show to his credit) takes the name Parsifal. He is gay. He has a Vietnamese lover, Phan. When Phan dies of AIDS, Parsifal marries the woman who has always adored him and who has lived with them both, his assistant Sabine. Then Parsifal himself dies in California, suddenly and shockingly, of an aneurysm. Parsifal always said that he had no living family and that he came from wealthy upscale Connecticut stock. The reality is very different, as Sabine learns from his lawyer. He came from a poor Nebraska family and they are very much alive. Indeed his mother and sister are on their way to California to meet Sabine, the daughter- and sister-in-law they know nothing about. It is bad that her husband has died. What Sabine must now cope with is coming to terms with his horrific past and the reason he divorced himself from his family and roots.
Accolades
Praise for The Magician's Assistant
Sabine, the magician's assistant of the title, is no longer young and gorgeous and limber. She makes her living constructing architectural models, just as her recently deceased magician husband, Parsifal, really made his living as a rug merchant.
There is something of allegory in Patchett's novel. There are times when its insistent current toward redemption risks flooding the life along the way, and there is a suggestion of the author's hand hovering at the sluice gate. Rarely does it do more than hover, though; rarely does the flood level do more than lap at the ingenious life and liveliness that Patchett has devised.
Patchett's ability to evoke sense of place... is near magical in itself.
Enchanting... Ann Patchett is the real thing.
The real appeal of The Magician's Assistant lies in the small, accumulating ways in which Sabine and the Fetters family assist one another out of isolation and sorrow. By the end, they have all been somewhat transformed--yes, by the magic of love. If it is hard not to squint at some of the flashy paradoxes Patchett uses to construct her narrative, then perhaps a struggle with credulity is precisely what she wants to encourage. Improbably relationships can flourish; strange havens do exist. Becoming accustomed to sad endings may be more naive than believing, now and then, in happily ever after.
The kindliness of The Magician's Assistant is beguiling, and Patchett is an adroit, graceful writer... she is especially practiced at the razzle-dazzle of odd juxtapositions.
Her finest novel... Patchett's lush and suspenseful story is also a portrait of America, which-- with its big dreams, vast spaces, and disparate realities lying side by side-- proves to be the perfect place for miraculous transformations, including Sabine's own.
About the author
