Deacon Review Legacy by Michael W. Fuller 11/4/2012 By Warren John Deacon

With Legacy, Michael Woodworth Fuller has painstakingly undermined and trashed most of what we believe about the relevance of war in our deferential politically-correct culture.

Fuller pretty much eschews literary rules and conventions and stitches into his tightly-wound nightmarish narrative all essential elements of the classic novel form: a plot that rushes forward ruthlessly. Impatient with a mere tale well-told, he has seriously upped the ante, fashioning his courageous, gutty, blood-soaked story in language utterly potent and unique and elevated -language that glides, plummets, dives, drops, rises ... only to fall, again and again, in a devastating crescendo of human despair and unbearable pain.

And the rhythm! Fuller often riffs wildly with the best of them -- now Dixieland resolute, then precipitously Coltrane cool, and then west coast Mulligan progressive, with never a hint of that valueless dreck now known as ‘Smooth Jazz.’

This is not a Smooth Novel nor is Fuller a Smooth Novelist. He’s painfully honest. This is not a stress-free midsummer shoreline read. It’s tough and demanding and unflinching. Some of the sexual scenes are incendiary and upsetting. Many descriptions, particularly of the protagonist’s injuries, are cruel and disgusting. The deaths – of a few of the principal characters – and the many emotional deaths that litter the fictional landscape like trash on the interstate, are unsympathetic and very, very desolate. Oddly like death itself.

Legacy does what all really significant novels do. It holds not only your feet, but your face, to the fire, demands that you confront the void that lies just below the surface and asks two very simple questions, simultaneously related and random, questions of a child or an idiot or a wise man: What is war? And why do we tolerate it?

A damn good read that stops your clock for a brief moment, it should be another landmark on your journey. It’s a frightening song. Honest and without pity. But it brings the most immense joy in the singing.

Michael Fuller wrote for the Promo Department at CBS-TV, particularly for “Mission Impossible,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Gomer Pyle.” He free-lanced for television with Allen Levitt and for independent films, prominent among them “Peace for a Gunfighter,” being the only B-rated film in a slew of C’s. While sending most of his time on Legacy, he wrote ISOMATA; The Place and its People, a history of the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, now known as Idyllwild Arts. Forthcoming after Legacy is Six! a volume of short stories to be published by Event Horizon Press. In the works and to be completed next year is Parole, the sequel to Legacy.

Other Stuff:

I knew how to steer a 2250-ton Destroyer through the raging China Sea of the Formosa Straits before I knew how to drive a car. It was the Cold War. The year was 1955. I was 17.

If the US Navy Reserves had granted my request to shift to the US Army Reserves, I wouldn’t be here. The unit I wanted to join was Green Berets Vietnam. That was 1958, five years before Advisors were sent to Vietnam.

AB, Spanish, San Francisco State College, 1961; MA, Drama San Francisco State College, 1963; PhD., Communications/Drama, USC, 1978. Senior Lecturer, School of Theater, USC; Guest Lecturer and Director, various colleges/universities; director in the professional theater;.

English Teacher, Los Angeles Unified School District.

Forthcoming:

Parole, sequel to Legacy
6! A collection of short stories
Mochila – a collection of short stories n Spanish
How Do You Learn ‘Em To Do Some of that Stuff? A handbook of how to DO

grammar.

Awards/Citations/Special Mention:

Alternate, Fulbright Scholar to Chile -
Two Drama-Logue Awards, Directing in the professional Theater District Golden Apple Award, LAUSD
Who’s Who in Amrican Teacers (4 mentions)
BPSC –20th Annual IRWIN Award for Best Fiction