The Exception: Uncle Buck’s Book of Irrepressible Navigation

This lively set of vignettes sees recurring Gifford protagonist Roy, last seen in the collection Roy’s World, getting an unorthodox education from his uncle Buck. In 1958, when Roy is 12, his father dies, and he begins spending summers and holidays with Buck, a fast-living, hard-gambling world traveler. Whether he’s working with the criminals and outsiders Buck employs in his construction business, learning how to skin a gator, sailing off the coast of Miami, or meeting the likes of Howard Hughes, Roy becomes acclimated to a hidden adult world of desperados, gamblers, and hoods, where “living is a very dangerous business.” Among the volume’s many colorful episodes is the one depicted in “The Golden Ball,” in which Buck is robbed of a hunk of gold jewelry he melted down after he showed it to a porn actress he was seeing. Buck teaches Roy never to bet the odds when everything is unpredictable, and his stories of gangsters and nightclubs become entries in the boy’s private mythology. Gifford is one of the last practitioners of the two-fisted storytelling of Ernest Hemingway—with whom, naturally, Buck is on a first-name basis. This sketchbook offers an urgent view into the larger-then-life denizens of a vanished America. (May)