47 pages • 1 hour read
The Magician's Assistant
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Part 1, Pages 3-71Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “At the Intersection of George Burns and Gracie Allen”
Part 1, Pages 3-14 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of anti-gay bias, domestic violence, and physical abuse, as well as discussion of AIDS and the social stigma of its diagnosis during the time the novel takes place.
Parsifal, a magician in Los Angeles, has died of an aneurysm. His wife and long-time assistant, Sabine, is devastated to be alone. She already lost Parsifal’s lover, Phan, 14 months ago due to complications from AIDS. Parsifal and Sabine have an unconventional marriage in which Sabine has “stayed in love with him for twenty-two years—even when she found out that he was in love with men” (10). Because Parsifal had AIDS, she was prepared for the likelihood that he would experience a difficult and slow death but always thought that she would have more time with him.
Part 1, Pages 15-30 Summary
Sabine arranges Parsifal’s funeral. She inherits Parsifal and Phan’s belongings and assets, but she feels estranged from Phan’s belongings, which include many notes in Vietnamese and some photographs of his French Vietnamese family. Parsifal’s lawyer, Roger, calls Sabine and tells her that he urgently needs to meet with her. Later, Sabine has a vivid dream in which Phan’s ghost speaks with her. In the dream, Phan implies that Parsifal died because Sabine did not wish him to have any pain. Phan also implies that Parsifal was keeping a secret from both him and Sabine.
Sabine had thought that Parsifal’s family was from Connecticut and that his birth name had been Petrie, but when Roger visits, he reveals that Parsifal’s birth name was actually Guy Fetters and that he was from Nebraska, where his mother and two sisters still live. Parsifal’s will bequeaths some money to the Fetter family. Sabine is shocked that Parsifal kept his family from her for over two decades. Upon reading the details of the will, Sabine learns that Parsifal’s mother’s name is Dorothy, and his two sisters are named Albertine and Kitty. Albertine is unmarried and lives with Dorothy, while Kitty is married to a man named Howard. They all live in Alliance, Nebraska. Sabine meets with her parents to tell them about Parsifal’s family. Sabine’s parents are loving and unconditionally supportive. They propose that Parsifal hadn’t told Sabine about his family because he wanted to protect her from them, surmising that they rejected him or hurt him somehow.
Part 1, Pages 31-49 Summary
Sabine looks through old boxes of letters and postcards. She finds a postcard addressed to Guy Fetters from Nebraska, dated 1966, announcing the birth of a sister and inviting him to return home. One day, Parsifal’s mother Dorothy, who goes by Dot, calls Sabine. Dot wants to meet Sabine and to see her son’s home. Dot has planned a trip to Los Angeles with her daughter Bertie (Albertine).
Sabine meets Dot and Bertie at the airport. Dot recognizes Sabine as Parsifal’s magician’s assistant from a Johnny Carson clip. Dot and Bertie are awed by the diversity in Los Angeles. Dot tells Sabine that the last time she saw Parsifal in person was in 1969, when he was 17 years old.
Part 1, Pages 50-71 Summary
At the cemetery, Dot talks to Parsifal’s grave. Bertie doesn’t remember Parsifal because she was only three years old the last time he was in Nebraska. Dot notices Phan’s grave very close to Parsifal’s, but Sabine doesn’t tell Dot that Phan was Parsifal’s boyfriend. Sabine brings Dot and Bertie to see the house. It is a Spanish-style mansion that Phan bought years ago with his earnings from Silicon Valley. Dot and Bertie see all the pictures of Phan in the house but don’t ask questions.
Sabine has many unanswered questions for Dot and Bertie, but she keeps them to herself. She thinks of the mysteries of Parsifal and his family as she builds a model for her work as an architectural model designer. Distracted, Sabine cuts herself on the hand with an X-Acto knife. The cut is deep and needs stitches, but Sabine tries to wrap it in gauze herself. Dot calls her from the hotel bar and asks her to come over for a drink. Sabine joins her at the bar, but Dot sees Sabine’s bloodied hand right away. Sabine is losing a lot of blood, and Dot insists that they go to the hospital. At the emergency room, Dot tells Sabine the story of how Parsifal got a scar on his face. He had been running with gardening shears as a child and cut himself. Parsifal told Sabine that the scar was a hockey injury from his college years. Despite Sabine's protestations that she is fine on her own, Dot goes into the hospital room with Sabine and holds her hand while she gets stitches.
Part 1, Pages 3-71 Analysis
The Magician’s Assistant immediately characterizes the protagonist, Sabine, in the context of Parsifal’s death and the inevitable grief of this loss, emphasizing The Importance of Family. As Sabine comes to terms with her new, solitary reality, Patchett explores the intertwined topics of lost love and unrequited love, imbuing the narrative with a tone of contemplative sadness. To this end, the exposition focuses primarily on providing the basics of Sabine and Parsifal’s unconventional marriage. Although her life with Parsifal was never devoid of love, her deeper feelings for her husband remained unrequited by necessity, as his romantic love was dedicated to Phan. In this light, it is clear that Sabine is a selfless, giving character with a nuanced understanding of the many varieties of love that can exist simultaneously. Throughout her marriage to Parsifal, Sabine willingly and even lovingly makes space for Phan, even though she is “jealous that Parsifal had found someone else to love so much” and becomes concerned that this connection will leave little room in his life for her (17).
Ultimately, however, the narrative suggests that Phan and Sabine are parallel characters who love Parsifal but find themselves eternally separate from him in different ways. Due to laws preventing gay marriage in the 1990s, Phan cannot marry Parsifal, but Parsifal’s sexual orientation prevents Sabine from having a relationship that is as full and deep as Parsifal’s connection with Phan. Significantly, the arrangements of Sabine’s marriage mirror the arrangements of her professional life on the stage, for even in the context of Parsifal’s magic show, she is positioned as an “extra woman” in her role as the magician’s assistant. This subordinate status objectifies her and relegates her to merely serving a practical purpose in Parsifal’s life rather than developing an identity of her own. Additionally, the narrative implies that just as she performs the role of magician’s assistant on the stage, she also “performs” the role of Parsifal’s wife in their everyday lives.
With the revelation that Parsifal has lied outright about his family, Patchett introduces The Unknowability of the Inner Self, foreshadowing the intense reassessment that Sabine will be forced to make of her husband’s early life and past decisions. This development compounds her existing grief, for although her love for Parsifal remains undiminished, she must contend not only with the void of his absence but also with the ghost of the person he used to be and the vestiges of a life he never truly shared. Faced with these harsh truths, Sabine must now decide whether her version of Parsifal is authentic. As she reflects, “It was one thing to have spent your life in love with a man who could not return the favor, but it was another thing entirely to love a man you didn’t even know” (38). In this moment, Sabine’s unconditional love and devotion for Parsifal is called into question, challenging in turn her own sense of identity. As she struggles to recalibrate her understanding of the enigmatic man who was her husband, this internal conflict drives Sabine’s character development throughout the novel.
The Unknowability of the Inner Self is further emphasized during Sabine’s first awkward visit with Dot and Bertie, for as they wander through the remnants of Parsifal’s life, their deliberate silence on key topics such as the pictures of Phan and the presence of his grave next to Parsifal’s emphasize the long years of silence that have endured between Parsifal and his remaining family. Faced with this incontrovertible evidence of her husband’s secret past, Sabine finds herself with little recourse for reconciling the two versions of Parsifal that now haunt her thoughts, and Dot’s initial failure to inquire about the most vital aspects of Parsifal’s life imply that she still holds a degree of disapproval over the choices he was compelled to make. Also implicit in this silence beneath the pleasantries is the tumultuous past that will only be revealed in future chapters, but despite this initial awkwardness, Dot’s compassion for Sabine and her insistence on accompanying her to the hospital foreshadow her willingness to extend a degree of familial affection toward the woman who shared her son’s life.
As the hidden aspects of Parsifal’s past life gradually reveal themselves, Patchett introduces the key theme of Reinventing Personal Identity. In these early chapters, Parsifal’s reasons for lying about his past remain unknown, but his lies hint at a larger conflict that his change of name and circumstances endeavored to leave behind. Thus, his mysterious past does not negate the authenticity of his respect and love for Sabine. Faced with the realization that her husband felt compelled to reinvent himself for the sake of his own well-being, Sabine recognizes that “to have the privilege of wearing your own skin […] was the true life, the one you would admit to. […] [Parsifal] was a changeling, separated at birth from his own identity” (39). In this moment, Sabine understands that Parsifal had the right to form a new identity separate from the truth about his family, thereby reinventing himself and embracing true freedom.
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By Ann Patchett
