60 for 60: The Magician’s Assistant’s Dream

By Madison Shimoda

One of our Editors’ Fiction Award Winners in 1987 was none other than Ann Patchett, whose book of essays, These Precious Days, came out earlier this week. In our interview with Patchett about her new book, Patchett talks about how the unpredictable moments in life—for instance, a friend’s daughter’s desire for a typewriter and the opportune existence of Patchett’s husband’s spare one—are what often inspires her to write essays. It seems like this idea of surprise is key to how Patchett constructs her narratives and certainly in her short story “The Magician’s Assistant’s Dream” from our twelfth issue.

You could say the story begins at the end. Almost immediately, we learn that Faith’s relationship with her lover, Gabriel, is infirm. We then move back in time to the narrator’s life before Gabriel’s appearance and continue until we arrive at the present. While we know where the story is headed, there are elements of the unexpected at every juncture, almost as if we’re watching a magic act. Patchett manages to make the ending (which she ostensibly gives to us at the start) unexpected and refreshing, and this feels satisfying for the reader who might have felt she knew where the story was going. As I came to the close of the story, I found myself asking, how did Patchett, in only seven pages, deliver such an emotionally keen and stirring narrative? To quote the writer herself from the interview: “the unpredictable moment is important.”