THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT.<i> By Ann Patchett</i> .<i> Harcourt Brace: 360 pp., $23</i>

“Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story.” It is a nervy way to begin a novel; right at the start, it advises its readers: “Go away.”

The readers will stay, of course. Our belief in the advice has been instantly suspended, a counterpart to the suspension of disbelief with which we invite a magician to fool us, knowing the magic is not real.

“The Magician’s Assistant” is put together with considerable canniness. The just-dead Parsifal was a magician with a prosperous rug business on the side. Sabine, his longtime assistant and would-be lover--he was gay--speaks with the conviction that her life and story are now at an end.

As if writing a cycle of death and resurrection, which her book in part resembles, Ann Patchett divides it in two. First is Sabine’s version of the end of her story, finely shaped but static, as an elegy is static if it is for someone we didn’t know and can no longer expect to discover. Then, in the second part, life begins again.

More exactly, it begins for the first time. The assistant, standing to one side for 20 years, becomes the protagonist. As in gardens, life grows out of the remains of death. The story, lovely up to this point but inert, begins to move.

Parsifal--a stage name; his real name was Guy Fetters--had died of a sudden stroke, though he was gravely ill with AIDS and would have lasted painfully a year or two at most. No mercy in this for Sabine: “I wanted that time,” she laments. Afterward, she returns to the beautiful Los Angeles house she had shared with him and his Vietnamese lover, Phan, until Phan died of AIDS.

Sabine was always the short side of the triangle; loving and loved but in a fashion equivalent to her role in Parsifal’s magic act. The two men lie in the twin grave plot they bought. There is a third plot alongside which Phan, a man of great sweetness, had quietly paid for so she would not feel left out. A strong, delicate and original writer, Patchett infuses hard things with a melancholy humor.

As Parsifal’s widow--loving her in his own way, he married her after Phan’s death--Sabine finds no prospect but “a leftover life to live” in the words of Dylan Thomas’ widow, Caitlin. Except that Sabine’s was an assistant leftover life. She has Parsifal’s house, possessions and money but no real share in them.

Suddenly she learns that Parsifal, who had claimed to be the orphan of a New Hampshire family killed in a car crash, has a mother and two sisters in Nebraska. The news is quickly followed by the arrival of Dot and Bertie Fetters. They have come to visit the places their son and brother loved and to meet his widow.

Reluctant, half-frozen, Sabine steels herself for an ordeal. It turns out to be a deliverance, the beginning of a long thaw. Not an easy one, more like dynamiting an ice-jammed river. Dot is direct and unsophisticated, someone you would expect to see at a grange supper. She is as nervous as Sabine, but love moves her, unstoppably.

At first, visiting Parsifal’s grave, Sabine feels her memory raided by this gray-permed stranger, and her altars smashed. She was prepared to take up a thin residence around a void; now here is Dot, determined to populate the void with unrecognizable life. Sabine’s Parsifal is the Fetters’ Guy--separated traumatically from them as an adolescent, out of touch since but still their hope and mystery.

Dot is the staunch survivor of a long tragedy, but Patchett has made her vulnerable, life-size and possessed of a sense of self-limits that is also self-knowledge. Sabine is no secondary figure to her but full family; together, she hesitantly wagers, they can redeem the past and their mutual loss. She knew Guy was gay and minded it, but more important is the fact that he married and his widow is alive and present. Pierced by Dot’s vital energy, Sabine accepts an invitation to visit Nebraska.

It is a pilgrimage out of a world of despair and into a world of strangeness. Sabine studies a map. There are not many towns, roads or natural features; there is a lot of white. “It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.”

She will draw a picture, in fact, a portrait of herself as she has never known herself. The tabula rasa of the map is reproduced upon the blizzard-buried prairie around Dot Fetters’ modest small-town home.

A family is love, pain, battle and bloodshed, and Sabine goes through it all. There are secrets to be yielded up, painfully; among them is the story of Guy’s sadistic father and the violent event that freed the family of him, sent Guy to reform school and, later, put him out West and out of touch. There is the family’s holy relic: a video, played regularly, of Guy triumphing on the Johnny Carson show and Sabine, as his beautiful assistant.

For the family, it redeems the suffering and loss. When Sabine sees it, she finds a different redemption. The Fetters family has treasured her image as much as Guy’s. And she remembers that the floating-woman act on the Carson show was more hers--in the painful contortions she had to practice--than his. The meaning of assistant begins to shift. By the end, her presence will have restored to herself and to the Fetters women what Guy’s absent past and absent present, respectively, had deprived them of.

Together Sabine, Dot, Bertie and her older sister Kitty--Guy’s confidant and worshiper when they were growing up--will piece together the figure of whom each holds a part. The partnership will deliver each of them into their futures; sometimes, as with the spark that ignites between Sabine and Kitty, a surprising one.

The women, Parsifal and Phan--who appears in Sabine’s dreams as a magically kind ghost--have a wonderfulness that collectively can be unnerving. But mostly they are wonderful, as well as individual, smart and battling hard. There is something of allegory in Patchett’s novel. There are times when its insistent current toward redemption risks flooding the life along the way, and there is a suggestion of the author’s hand hovering at the sluice gate. Rarely does it do more than hover, though; rarely does the flood level do more more than lap at the ingenious life and liveliness that Patchett has devised.