The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Tell me to read a book, a novel per se, about a woman who is a magician's assistant -- yes, the always-pretty woman who appears to get sawed in half but comes out of the box intact with no legs or arms missing. Tell me the magician is gay, the woman is straight but in love with him, that she even marries him and lives a chaste life with him and his gay lover until they both die and leave her alone to inherit everything. Tell me she finds out -- to her dismay -- that this most cosmopolitan of men has a family in rural Nebraska -- a mom with permed hair and lots of secrets, a sister with an abusive husband, and more. And of course, they're mostly likable folks, ableit a tad strange.

Tell me I'll enjoy this book. Tell me I'll find it plausible. I'd think you were joshing or just plain clueless. But I did enjoy it. I did find it believable -- even a bit too predictable near the end. And, yes, I'd recommend it to you -- well, maybe not to my mother but to you, the people who read my blog and who find it not so incredible that a straight woman might knowingly marry a gay man -- and be happy.

Why should that premise even sound so bizarre? How many marriages between two straight people are based on convenience or need? How many start out based on love or on what the two thought was love but change in a few months or a few years? Maybe those couples are miserable. But I'd argue that not all of them are. Some of those people likely married for other reasons -- money, gratitude, need, companionship, expectations. And perhaps some married for love, but not the kind that's always consummated in the bedroom. Or maybe the reasons for the marriage changed over time with one or both spouses. I'm not saying these arrangements are ideal. But they exist and are probably more prevalent than traditionalists realize.

Patchett, also the author of the critically acclaimed Bel Canto, wrote this less well-known novel in the late 1990s. Her writing is clear, concise, lyrical. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." Well, maybe not: Those are the book's first two sentences.

This novel is about Sabine, a 40-something magician's assistant who lives in and loves Los Angeles. As the assistant, she's always been the one at the side, the one who stays out of the spotlight. But in Patchett's novel, Sabine takes the spotlight and proceeds to shine it on the other characters she comes to know through Parsifal, the man we never get to meet except through all of the other characters' shared memories.

And the fact that I loved this book, to my own surprise, perhaps speaks to the magic that literature can work in all of us.