47 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PatchettThe Magician's Assistant
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Family
In The Magician’s Assistant, Patchett emphasizes the importance of family while articulating the unconventionality and diversity of such relationships. In many ways, Sabine herself serves as a bridge between the different family dynamics, for she has developed an empathic nature due to the unconditional love she receives from her parents. Because she learned how to love and be loved, Sabine is generous with how she shares her affections for others. While this approach serves her in good stead, her positive experience also stands as a sharp contrast to Parsifal’s childhood trauma, and the narrative implies that she will never be able to fully understand the motivations that led him to make certain life choices. Because she does not have the family trauma from which Parsifal escaped, an emotional chasm has always existed between them.
Despite this emotional roadblock, Sabine is open to unconventional familial relationships even though she comes from a supportive and loving family. As Patchett gradually reveals, Sabine’s marriage to Parsifal is far less than a true partnership even though it represents their genuine love for one another. Because Parsifal cannot love Sabine in the way she loves him, she chooses to accept the version of love that he can give. As she states, “I just decided it was better to take what I had. To accept things. I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone” (76). Indeed, Sabine’s love for Parsifal is untraditional she accepts his version of love and endures her unreciprocated romantic feelings because she believes this arrangement to be far better than not being loved by him at all. While others believe that Sabine is sacrificing herself for a lost cause, Sabine’s devotion to Parsifal even in the midst of these limitations is a form of true love. Thus, her marriage supports the commonly held truism that families come in all forms.
Sabine’s unconventional family with Parsifal ultimately leads her to a different style of family that ultimately becomes just as important to her as her nontraditional marriage. In Nebraska, Sabine learns from the Fetters how to be a part of a large family, navigating many layers of history and drama. As the narrative states, “[The Fetters] wanted […] to be close to Sabine. Dot and Bertie Fetters wanted her attention. They wanted her love. It was not in their nature to shy away from what they wanted” (110). The increased intensity of this give-and-take dynamic models a more reciprocal relationship that provides Sabine with a new sense of fulfillment. Although her parents dote on her and Sabine has spent her life looking after Parsifal’s needs, the Fetters offer her a new family experience, for she suddenly finds herself becoming a part of a larger whole, one in which they look after her and she looks after them. With his death, Parsifal gives Sabine the gift of a new family, albeit a complicated one.
The Unknowability of the Inner Self
In The Magician’s Assistant, Patchett explores the fact that other people are mysterious and essentially unknowable. Even within family units or relationships, people live entire internal lives keeping their thoughts and past traumas to themselves, and Parsifal himself stands as the ultimate example of this dynamic. When his lies about his family finally come to light, Sabine cannot help but feel betrayed by this decades-long deception. For the entirety of their marriage, he and Sabine were so close that Sabine trusted in the veracity of everything he told her about himself. Thus, discovering his lies after his death makes her realize, “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 of Sabine’s anguished reflections, Patchett suggests that even the most intimate partners have secrets that they prefer not to reveal, keeping their inner selves closely guarded from scrutiny.
A major journey in Sabine’s character development throughout the novel is to resolve the conflict she has with Parsifal’s lies and discover the hidden parts of his past and his character. As she learns more about his early family experiences, she soon realizes the utter impossibility of clarifying every mystery of his life, for each new answer brings as much confusion as it does clarity. As she works to piece together the details of his early life, her attempts to demystify Parsifal become a deeper journey into the mysteries of her own inner self. She eventually concludes that her very lack of knowledge about Parsifal’s past allowed him to move on to a healthier, happier future. As she reflects, “Maybe it was better […] to never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget” (80). In this light, it becomes clear to her that she could have been either the assistant to Parsifal’s happiness or yet another reminder of his past traumas. By lying to her about his childhood, Parsifal ironically strengthened their relationship, leaving the horrors of his past in the past.
Thus, Sabine learns to accept that people are inherently mysterious, and this lesson is reinforced when she travels to Nebraska and must navigate an ocean’s worth of unfamiliar and often precarious family dynamics. Each day brings new revelations about Parsifal or about the people who once influenced his life. Over time, Sabine realizes that even though she is willing to try to get to know people all over again for the sake of love, building such intimacy takes time and effort, and trust is often hard-earned. As Dot and Kitty open up to her and gift her with new insights into themselves and Parsifal, Sabine learns to balance her investigations with their need to maintain enough space for their secrets.
Reinventing Personal Identity
In The Magician’s Assistant, Parsifal is the embodiment of the empowered individual, for he recreates his own identity, and his pursuit of radical self-determination allows him to escape from Nebraska, where his sexual orientation and creativity would otherwise be stifled. This solution also allows him to break free of the stigma of his crime. As the narrative states:
Suddenly to have the privilege of wearing your own skin, the headlong rush of love, the loss of the knifepoint of loneliness. That was the true life, the one you would admit to. Why even mention the past? It was not his past. He was a changeling, separated at birth from his own identity (39).
In Los Angeles, Parsifal reinvents himself and therefore lives a happier and more fulfilled life. Even though this decision requires turning away from his mother and siblings and lying to his found family about his past, Parsifal’s new reality is not a lie; it is far more authentic for him than the life to which he was born.
Patchett also explores this theme within the motif of magic, for the relationship between a magician and his audience is based on power dynamics that replicate society and the individual. As Sabine observes of the process of choosing volunteers for Parsifal’s magic shows, these power dynamics make it so that
[p]eople never seem to take into account that they can say no. [Some people] truly, desperately did not want to be called onto stage and begged to be passed over, but when […] the magician asked, no one ever thought to tell him to go to hell (101).
This description proves that, unlike Parsifal, most people defer to a perception of authority and fail to advocate for themselves even when they can or should. This difference is also what makes Parsifal a magician and Sabine a magician’s assistant; Sabine is much more comfortable with taking directions than with taking charge, and she does not value holding power over others. By contrast, Parsifal learned to value power because he experienced true powerlessness and went through so much to empower himself.
Patchett also reveals that for some people, recreating identity is a method of survival. For Parsifal, his deliberate choice to reinvent himself was a matter of embracing a more authentic life and living it fully. Significantly, he possessed this quality even in childhood, for as Kitty recalls, “He had a whole school notebook full of names. […] There was a general alias, […] then there would be a stage name, and then he would pick out a third name that would be his backup” (164). Parsifal’s inclination to create aliases is an early sign of his belief that identity can be shifted to suit different needs and desires, and his willingness to experiment in this sphere marks him as radical, brave, and wholly committed to living his life free of societal expectations. Within this context, his choice to lie and deceive others about his past is not meant to be perceived negatively; instead, it is the epitome of self-determination. Ultimately, Parsifal’s lies and deception supported a larger cause: to live authentically and to become the person he was truly meant to be.
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By Ann Patchett
