I read Maxine slowly because I like to sit and dream with characters a while. I find the author’s language, dialogue, and plot effective and compelling. I am a poet and I doff my poet hat to Remick. That’s rare and Remick is a rara avis.

His descriptive powers are vast. When Maxine finds her sister in the accurately described strip joint, we look, we see, we hear, we taste and smell the details. I am a writer and every skill I tried to impart to students and writers is right here.

Some people have native talent. Remick deserves recognition for his talent and skill. He creates an equally compassionate world for females as well as males. That world is balanced, alive, intricate.

And then there’s the memory child, holding up the center.

As a woman, I get Maxine. Women have paid for all they must take. For example, Maxine, as the narrator sees her in the bathroom mirror, is Kali the destroyer and the creator of worlds. With four arms she holds her Mother, Ted, Emily, and Charlie. Her archetypal presence is palpable here.

Remick utilizes some scorching language and images. I’ll never see the madonna on the rocks without a fifth and a glass of Ice. Sometimes authors don’t know the electricity coursing through their own creations.

As I drew near to the ending, I saw an image that, for me, defined Maxine the character. She is standing in a doorway as if the architect had planned the building just to frame her. It is a painting in words.

This is a big story of the big HERo. And I spell it that way because this is Maxine’s story as she overcomes obstacles to find her way to truth. Her’s is every woman’s story because in some degree Maxine is all of us—a woman carrying forward the pain and anguish of all women who have been in a battering domestic relationship. Maxine knows that there is going to be the next man, and the next and the next until she acts to free herself. And this she does. Does she ever.

Maxine is a story of a journey that covers almost no geographic territory. Rather it is a geography of pain that keeps the characters fixed until they discover the deeper meaning of the four letter L Word.

Maxine is a story of fire and water. Death comes in fire and it comes in water. It is a story of purification and in the end, fire cleanses as the obstacles all burn.

Remick, as novelist, has all the right instincts, artistically, and as it turns out, politically as well. I admire writers who, in the toughest of times—this novel was written at the height of the current plague—see the political reality and still write their way through it.

Remick is a formidable artist writing in a trying age and the characters receive all his love, care and attention. Maxine is a delicious read.

Jack Remick is a writer’s writer: essayist, novelist, short story writer, blogger, poet, Facebook guru. If Remick was a painter, he would be cast in the mould of Vincent van Gogh—seeking the light, no matter what.

Maxine the book stands apart from Remick’s other work because it is a novella. Maxine started out as a novel, but then Covid-19 kept us inside, away from the coffee shops, the perfect time for a rewrite.

Maxine the book transformed into a novella because Remick deployed a structural analysis device called the “Cut-To,” a tool fashioned when Remick taught screenwriting. Using the Cut-To, Remick chopped out over a hundred pages. When I asked him what changed, he said: “The character transformations left the bad boy dead, Maxine purified, and Berle re-connected to his emotional life.”

Maxine the character (thirty-something, hard, smart, tough, wise, sensual, dangerous) is a woman desperate for purification: when she was twelve, her mother sold her for six hundred dollars. Maxine killed her mother and her new owner. Then she left her little sister in a bus station, called the police, hopped on the bus, and sold her body for bread.

We meet Maxine through the eyes of the narrator, Berle Kubiak, an ironic, wise-cracking film noir lone-rider tarnished knight anti-hero who drives a BMW 850. Berle works for Charlie, a concrete contractor, and the current Big Daddy in Maxine’s life. Maxine steals money from Charlie, hops into the BMW 850, and directs Berle to a hotel in Portland, Oregon. Using her body like a weapon, Maxine ignites Berle’s lust. Berle feels the heat—he also feels dead inside.

When he taught his writing courses, Remick laid down the function of fiction in our lives: “The role of fiction,” he said, “is to drag the past into the present.”

In Maxine the book, Remick builds a portal to the past—the fictional Hotel Franklin, located in Portland, half a day’s drive from Charlie’s concrete business.

“The foyer of the Franklin Hotel is gray marble with sky blue drapes. The front desk is art deco mahogany and the furniture is art deco spare and lean…”

The key to the room is “an old-fashioned key that will fit an old-fashioned lock in an old-fashioned door that will have geometric woodwork on it and be painted sky blue like the drapes…”

With the portal to the past in place, Maxine hunts down her little sister. While Maxine digs up the past, Berle keeps looking over his shoulder. Where is Charlie? Where is Charlie’s goon, a man named Clyde?

Maxine is a wronged woman fighting for her life, a soiled princess who has recruited a knight in tarnished armor to help her achieve redemption. To tell her story, Remick uses objects. Not objects like pumpkin and glass slipper and a cathedral bell chiming the hour of midnight—because Maxine is no Cinderella—but an object more in tune with the film-noir genre, an object delivered to the room in the Hotel Franklin where Maxine and Berle are arguing over their next move, when the desk clerk delivers a box. Here’s Berle:

“I open the box and inside there’s a head. A head shrunk like a prune, a bone through the nose, small freckles on the cheeks black as ants. Lips stitched shut, the ears pierced and studded with emeralds….”

The box is a warning. What do they do now? To find out, you gotta buy this book.