The Magician’s Assistant was published by Harcourt Brace in 1997. Sabine has spent her adult life as the assistant to Parsifal, a gifted Los Angeles stage magician — and loving him, despite knowing he was gay and despite his marriage to his partner Phan. When Phan dies of AIDS and then Parsifal dies shortly after, Sabine discovers that Parsifal’s entire past was fabricated: he was not an orphan raised in Connecticut but Guy Fetters from Alliance, Nebraska, a small town he fled as a teenager. His mother and sisters are alive and have been waiting decades to hear from him.
Sabine travels to Nebraska and enters a world entirely unlike Los Angeles: bitter cold, small-town conservatism, a family shaped by the domestic violence that drove Guy/Parsifal to reinvent himself. Patchett uses the magician metaphor structurally: Parsifal’s professional skill was misdirection, and his entire life was a magic trick — a spectacular surface designed to prevent the audience from seeing what was actually happening. Sabine’s task is to look behind the trick, to see the machinery of pain and survival that produced the dazzling persona she loved.
The Nebraska sections are among Patchett’s finest writing: the family dynamics, the landscape, the collision between Sabine’s cosmopolitan sensibility and small-town reality are rendered with warmth and precision. Patchett refuses to make Nebraska a simple place of oppression from which Parsifal escaped; it is also a place of loyalty, resilience, and love, and the family he abandoned has its own claims on truth.
Collecting The Magician’s Assistant
First edition (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1997): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30