Ann Patchett - The Magician's Assistant

At the risk of sounding distinctly asinine, The Magician's Assistant is magical. The novel tells the story of Sabine, devoted magician's assistant to Parsifal the Magician, as she attempts to make sense of Parsifal's remaining family after his death. Sabine has known for 22 years that Parsifal's family is dead, yet when he dies of a brain aneurism a few years after his partner's death from AIDS, she discovers that they are, in fact, alive and well.

As always, Patchett's prose is graceful and understated, moving the story and characters along without superfluous description or exposition. Sabine is a native of Los Angeles, and as such her descriptions of the city and Southern California hold particular resonance for other natives. The narrative has a clear forward sweep, and though it is punctuated by flashback and dream sequences, they do not detract from the motion of the plot, and in fact give depth to Sabine's character.

The novel reminded me of another 'magically' titled book about the aftermath of death - Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Both books retain a quality of disbelief in the fact of a central person's absence. Both Didion and Patchett capture the power of the survivor's desire to see, speak to, be with the deceased again, and show poignantly how this manifests in picking up the pieces of life and moving on.

A fantastic book, and one that I did NOT want to put down.