The Magician's Assistant

Prompted by her grief and by the prospect of a new connection with Parsifal, Sabine willingly embraces her husband’s estranged family, hoping to learn more about the mysteries that he left behind. In this context, Patchett emphasizes The Importance of Family even as she reveals the many forms that families can take. As Sabine considers how the Fetters family can help her reconstruct a version of the Parsifal she never knew, she will also have to come to terms with the fact that her husband valued Reinventing Personal Identity far more than maintaining his connections with his family of origin. Even his family name, “Fetters,” implies the restrictive nature of his childhood dynamics, for the term “fetters” is a synonym for “chains” or “restraints.” Thus, Patchett implies that Parsifal’s family history only held him back, and it was incumbent upon him to break free of the chains of his past and forge a new, authentic identity for himself.

Just as Parsifal felt compelled to search for a new identity, Sabine is also enduring the resolution of her internal conflict with magic. Her previous role as a magician’s assistant was not a passion; it was a product of her love for Parsifal. While her role in his act appears glamorous to outsiders, Sabine knows that “[m]agicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost. […] She had been a brightly painted label, a well-made box, a bottle cap” (98-99). As this passage emphasizes, Sabine served as an ornament in Parsifal’s professional stage life, fulfilling a role to support his illusions even as she herself was judged by the audience to be replaceable and objectified. Her extreme reluctance to take the stage again after Parsifal’s death emphasizes the fact that she wants to close that chapter of her life, even though it is so intimately tied to her devotion to her husband. Now, without Parsifal, Sabine must work on Reinventing Personal Identity in the absence of her loved ones and learn how to live for herself. However, at this early juncture, Sabine is still avoiding confronting her own development, for by focusing all her energies on the Fetters, she is symbolically tying herself to Parsifal once again. Thus, when his family comes into her life, Sabine willingly sees the best in them and perceives them as the key to getting to know more about Parsifal, thereby keeping him alive in some form.

Even as she focuses on these external concerns, Sabine is grappling with unresolved internal conflicts, and as the novel unfolds, these silent battles are enacted in a series of vivid dreams that reveal Sabine’s subconscious thoughts about her life and her marriage. As a plot device, these dreams allow Patchett to convey a great deal of otherwise unspoken information about Sabine’s innermost demons and unresolved issues. Additionally, this stylistic choice allows Patchett to include a quasi-living version of a dead character in the narrative, for she uses Sabine’s dreams to create a realistic sense of what Phan was like when he was alive. As these interludes punctuate the primary narrative, Sabine finds herself working through her past resentment of Phan and finding new common ground. In life, Phan and Sabine were close friends, but they were also rivals for Parsifal’s affection, and Sabine’s love constantly took second place to the connection between Parsifal and Phan. In death, however, the dream-version of Phan becomes a welcome presence and a reminder of that love even as his observations reflect her inner thoughts, her loneliness, and her unresolved conflicts.

Patchett adds deeper layers to Sabine’s development by highlighting the importance of Los Angeles, for the city is Sabine’s home and is therefore an important part of her identity. Significantly, Sabine’s emotional connection with Los Angeles outlasts her other layers of identity and comes to represent a source of acceptance and love. As Sabine observes, “They lived in the magnificence of a well-watered desert where things that could not possibly exist, thrived. They lived on the edge of a country that would not have cared for them anyway, and they were loved” (88). In this passage, Patchett frames Los Angeles as a setting of unconditional love and a place that allows its residents to manifest their true selves without fear of censure. This emphasis on the city’s openness foreshadows the impending contrast and culture shock that Sabine will experience upon visiting Parsifal’s childhood home in Nebraska. Even in Dot’s initial descriptions, it is clear that Nebraska is framed as a setting in which the culturally prominent influence of bigotry and anti-gay bias caused the young Parsifal to feel misunderstood and judged.