THE PRESTIDIGITATOR'S GREATEST ACT

Author: By Wendy Orent

Date: SUNDAY, November 2, 1997

Page: N3

Section: Books

Sabine is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Poles who meet in Israel, move to Montreal, and flee the snow and its harsh memories for the golden refuge of Los Angeles. Sabine is beautiful and intelligent. She is deft with her hands; she dreams of becoming an architect. But one day, waiting tables at a club called the Magic Hat, she's summoned to the stage by Parsifal the Magician. Parsifal is radiant, splendid: Sabine is only 19, but she's enthralled forever.

The book begins with Parsifal's death, at 45, of a cerebral aneurysm. They had been married only a few months, after 22 years' companionship: Sabine loved Parsifal, but Parsifal loved men. After the death from AIDS of his longtime French-Vietnamese lover, Phan, Parsifal married Sabine, knowing his own death from AIDS was also close at hand. `` `I love you,' Parsifal had said. `I want you to be my widow.' ''

The shaken Sabine, alone but for Parsifal's enormous white rabbit, now faces life as an assistant without her magician. She is 41; she has driven off every man who might have loved her.

And then she learns from her husband's lawyer that the Parsifal she thought she knew was an illusion. Like her parents, Parsifal had fled a grim past to reinvent himself in Los Angeles. Sabine knew only an invented history, of a Connecticut childhood, a Dartmouth education, a car crash that destroyed his family.

Now Sabine learns that Parsifal's real name was Guy Fetters, and that he had a mother and two sisters living in a small town in Nebraska. The mother and one sister appear and draw Sabine into their family circle: Enthralled again, she finds herself in Alliance, Neb., seeking traces of her husband's past. Who was Guy Fetters, and what dreadful thing did he flee? Who, really, was Parsifal?

The working out of these revelations is absorbing enough, though it's accompanied by a heavy-handed plot device: long, too-lucid dreams where the dead Phan imparts to Sabine a series of revelations. Just before she learns about Parsifal's family in Nebraska, Phan intones, ``You're not the only one who was in the dark about this whole thing. I didn't know, either. I want to tell you that. Parsifal kept this to himself. It was a decision he made a long time ago, and once he made up his mind he never went back. Not ever. So it was nothing against you or against me. It wasn't that he didn't love us enough.''

Also, to Sabine's horror, she learns that Parsifal's aneurysm was no accident, but the dead Phan's device -- a magical answer to her silent prayer that Parsifal not die a painful, lingering death.

There's a kind of dialectic here between magician's tricks and genuine magic, between Parsifal's craft and Phan's revelations. Near the end, Sabine performs a card trick (learned from Phan in a dream) that makes her tremble, because no logic can explain it. The magician's assistant wields real magic now.

There's also another dialectic -- between cold, flat Alliance, where all the tiny row houses look alike, where the most ``romantic'' place to go is a Wal-Mart, where ``people freeze to death all the time, but never . . . on the night you hope for it,'' and glittering Los Angeles. ``If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins out.''

And finally, there's a perfect symmetry between the love Sabine has always longed for and the love she eventually finds (which the attentive reader will see coming a long way off).

These delicate correspondences are artful but too pat. They nod about the hollow core of the book like lilies around a gravestone. The central mystery of the book has nothing to do with why Guy Fetters fled Nebraska and transformed himself into Parsifal the magician. (Guy's life gives you a genuine frisson of horror: His father kicked his pregnant mother as she lay on the kitchen floor, and once forced the boy to empty the refrigerator and crawl inside while he shut the door and calmly waited for his son to suffocate.) The real puzzle is why Sabine loved Parsifal for 22 years, and beyond all hope.

Parsifal is empty, a cipher, the dark heart of this book. He never springs into life, perhaps because we're forced to view him through Sabine's eyes. We are told Parsifal is dazzling, but we cannot see that dazzlement ourselves.

So it's difficult to accept Sabine's 22-year thralldom. Patchett needed to create a character compelling enough to show us why Sabine devoted her life to a man who could not love her. The clever, talented Parsifal wins our sympathy, but he can't enchant us. He's a conceit as thin as colored silk pulled from a magician's hat.

Patchett is a strikingly original writer; her book is filled with small, swift observations: ``The moon, which was nothing more than a white hole punched out of the Hollywood night, had its own landscape in Nebraska, as accessible as flour in a bowl.'' But for all its artistry the book is as planned as a trick, as flat as Nebraska. It lacks the messiness, the conviction, the dust of life.