To scholars and fans of Cormac McCarthy’s work, Peter Josyph needs little introduction. His Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy (2010) has now become something of a classic—whether you agree with Josyph’s takes or not—in the field of McCarthy studies. Since then, he has penned several others, including Cormac McCarthy’s House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls (2013) and The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses (2020), developing an often-adversarial, anecdotal style based on personal, affective interpretations of McCarthy’s novels, plays, and screenplays, rather than an academic style of criticism. In his newest work, Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws, late McCarthy is fixed in Josyph’s crosshairs: specifically, McCarthy’s 2013 screenplay The Counselor, its film version from the same year, and McCarthy’s 2022 novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws is at times an incendiary book, at others an infuriating one, but no matter the reader’s own perspective on the works Josyph takes to task, you should know that reading Josyph’s insights is always a gratifying experience.The book is split into three parts, each ostensibly dealing with one bounded topic: part I on The Counselor (the book and the film), part II on The Passenger, and part III on Stella Maris. However, in practice, the distinctions between sections bleed into one another as Josyph finds in The Counselor bad witticisms, hackneyed plotting, and thrice warmed-over McCarthyisms (devoid of their initial context and thus denuded of power), all of which presage similar issues in The Passenger and Stella Maris. Part II on The Passenger often refers back to discussions in part I. Given that The Passenger and Stella Maris are companion novels of a sort, part II obviously discusses Stella Maris at great length. Finally, part III includes only one rather short chapter, which includes reflections on Stella Maris’s audiobook, McCarthy’s failures as a science/physics/mathematics educator in the book, and the revelation of a major plot hole concerning the psychiatrist of Stella Maris’s protagonist Alicia Western.By critiquing McCarthy’s late works, Josyph accomplishes a reframing of what some critics have called McCarthy’s late style in the wake of the publication of The Passenger and Stella Maris. As an illustration, in an October 19, 2022, review for the New York Times, John Jeremiah Sullivan spoke of this late style, claiming that McCarthy—no longer beholden to public or critical tastes given his financial success as an author—was now more comfortable dwelling in mysteries than in providing what would amount to insufficient attempts at explaining them. That is to say, the oddness of these two new novels with undeveloped thriller plotlines, disconnected narratives, and the absence of closure were intentionally written in this way to make a larger epistemological point about the insufficiency of human narrative to comprehend and contain the world’s complexity (an argument with which I agree and defend in an essay for the forthcoming collection New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris). Instead of supporting this new critical consensus about McCarthy’s late style, Josyph points to dozens of plot holes, examples of bad writing, and ethical lapses in late McCarthy, which bespeak, instead, a lack of editorial guidance, the dwindling of his attention to craft, or to shifts in McCarthy’s worldview that resulted in bad writing practices.Despite his critiques of McCarthy’s lack of structure in his final two books (135), Josyph embraces a similar structureless-ness in his book. However, much like in McCarthy’s novels, the lack of a formal structure in Josyph’s book does not impede a general structuring repetition of various styles or themes. The first of these structuring forms is the short chapter “take,” where he presents a few observations on a specific, bounded topic in one of the works. After a short preface extolling the virtues of McCarthy’s otherwise “extraterrestrial” (3) or otherworldly genius on display in previous novels like Suttree or Blood Meridian, part I of Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws, “What’s Wrong with What’s Wrong with The Counselor,” begins with twelve rather short chapters articulating various issues with both the screenplay and the film. For example, the opening chapters discuss basic plotting issues with the screenplay, while chapter four critiques the “vile silliness” (37) and depravity on display in The Counselor, which Josyph argues that McCarthy revels in and takes no pains to critique. In chapter 5, “Reiner’s Olive,” Josyph calls attention to Malkina’s feline description, finding in this Grimalkin’s catness a too-on-the-nose characterization, and calling to my mind Namwali Serpell’s definition of “New Literalism” in the cinema. In other chapters, Josyph takes McCarthy to task for misogynistic representations in The Counselor, for the sleekness of the film’s cinematography when the topics are so gritty and nihilistic, for the illogical reasoning behind the counselor character going into business with the cartels in the first place, for misplacement of wise philosophizing in the mouths of criminals, and more.Although these sections—and his other “short takes” chapters in the later parts of the book on The Passenger and Stella Maris—can, at times, feel like nitpicking without addressing the elements’ roles within the larger context of the screenplays or novels he is discussing, Josyph’s book really takes off in chapters 13, 14, 16, and 17, where he enjoins the collaboration of a fellow Cormac McCarthy fan and scholar Marty Priola. Each of these discussions, really call-and-response (collected via email exchange) chapters, include in-depth dialogues between Josyph and Priola on the works at hand. In chapter 14, “The Counselor Under Cover: A Conversation with Marty Priola,” Josyph introduces an interpretive allegory: the Fox and the Hedgehog. Whereas the Fox is analytical and called to smaller, more bounded questions and observations, the Hedgehog is more continental (philosophically speaking) and drawn to larger questions about purpose, meaning, and overall structure. In these chapters, Priola becomes the Hedgehog to Josyph’s Fox, forcing the conversation back, time and again, to McCarthy’s “vision for The Counselor” (101) or to the broader epistemological concerns of The Passenger and Stella Maris as a justification for their fractured narratives. These longer exchanges between Josyph and Priola break up the rhythm of Josyph’s shorter takes, establishing a movement in Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws from the particular to the universal and back again. This wonderful circling movement brings to mind Martin Heidegger’s or Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle and other theories of interpretation that move from text to context and back to illuminate meaning within a text. Through this circling process, Josyph and Priola reach consensus on some issues and they develop better questions about others. The result is an enlightening reading experience, which both addresses significant questions in McCarthy studies and in literary criticism itself, besides what is, for me, its primary value: eliciting entertainment through contestation and debate.What I found most instructive in the book, as an academic myself, was Josyph’s critique of the ways literary critics have approached McCarthy’s work in the past, and the alternative ways of reading McCarthy that Josyph suggests. In Nell Sullivan’s review of Josyph’s The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy, she describes Josyph’s approach to reading as “a new form of reader-response criticism, one that moves away from the communal consensus of meaning and into the individual’s interaction with the text” (196). In the preface to Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws, Josyph calls his essays “reader’s memoirs” or “the autobiography of a reader” (11), while Priola (in chapter 16) characterizes Josyph’s interpretive mode as “reader-response” and his own as “New Criticism” (143). However like postcritique Josyph’s subjective reader-response criticism seems—especially given postcritique’s and Josyph’s resistance to depth readings and their embrace of the personal—Josyph nevertheless rejects contemporary allergy to critique by postcritics like Rita Felski or Stephen Best. In chapter 17, Josyph introduces a past discussion between himself and the McCarthy scholar Scott Yarbrough who defined the difference between scholarly and aesthetic criticism by claiming that scholars do not make value judgments (156). Josyph rightly argues that any time a scholar chooses to write about a work of fiction, they are nevertheless making an implicit value judgment of that work and thereby doing the work of canon-building, knowingly or otherwise. When we write about McCarthy, we make it clear that McCarthy’s work is worth teaching, reading, studying, interpreting, and critiquing, not just for us, but for the larger community of literary critics writ large. Throughout the book, Josyph insists that critiquing the works of great authors is a necessary kind of evil: one that editorial staff and writers ought to take more seriously if they want to ensure that their works are remembered in perpetuity. While Josyph believes ultimately that “Molann an Obair an Fear” or “The work praises the man” (75), and that McCarthy’s legacy is in no real danger, as any passionate acolyte he nevertheless worries that works perceived to be critical misfires may tarnish that reputation. For Josyph, McCarthy’s editors ought to have been more careful in what they allowed to be printed of his late works. It is Josyph’s opinion that it is the job of the critic not only to congratulate the writer when they succeed, but to critique their work when it is not on par with their best.In discussing his methodology (especially in the dialogues with Marty Priola), Josyph explains:This statement of purpose could equally well serve to answer methodological questions proposed by literary critics today, in papers, in seminars, in conferences. Why do you read differently than me? Don’t you know my methodology is the only correct one? To these kinds of arrogant critical appraisals of others’ works, Josyph responds simply: “I am doing something different.” To be a real community of scholars, Josyph reminds us that we must continue to recognize this truth in our own communities as literary critics, scholars, readers, and educators.
Joshua Cody Ward (2026) studied this question.