The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses by Peter Josyph (review)

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• The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses by Peter Josyph
• Patrick Vincent

Peter Josyph, The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses. New York: Ivesian Arts Publishing, 2021. 267 pp. Paper, $39.95.

Peter Josyph loves Cormac McCarthy, and his book The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses is an interesting one, existing somewhere between a supplemental reading guide to All the Pretty Horses, a work of autoethnographic literary criticism, and a textual discussion between admirers and scholars of McCarthy. Josyph situates McCarthy's protagonist(s) in relation to his own life and experiences, using each to understand the other. As a premise, the text articulates an unusual goal: "looking for only given circumstances in the first few pages of All the Pretty Horses" (22). Josyph explains that given circumstances represent "the hard empirical evidence that is … clear and distinct in the text," not perceptions, inventions, imaginings, or interpretations from outside the novel. He admits, however, that he "failed in the task miserably," suggesting that it felt like a "fresh approach to venturing into the novel" (21). This admission of failure signifies the "wrong" in Josyph's title and emphasizes a valuable point about our approach to critical methodology: that there is no "right" way to approach a text, and that the so-called "wrong" way can still garner a generative discussion. Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the book comes from Josyph himself, when he refers to The Wrong Reader's Guide as "this little guide for the wayward wayfarer who doesn't mind waywarding farther off the path" (200).

The book is divided into three main sections, comprising a total of fifteen chapters. Part one, "How Cormac McCarthy Saved Civilization," provides Josyph's autoethnographic foregrounding and centers analysis around Josyph's personal relationship to the text and its resonances within his own life. In this section he spends great amounts of time constructing grandiose statements about the importance of McCarthy as a writer, likening his work to other great texts, such as Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov. Josyph's argument in this section focuses on our ability to extend McCarthy backward and forward through time, where we can find meaning in older texts by way of McCarthy's more recent work. This of course runs against the notion of situating his reading in only the given circumstances [End Page 179] of John Grady Cole's time in San Angelo, Texas, but Josyph always seems to return to the opening of the novel. The second section, "Garrano, Prince of Denmark," is comprised of a series of correspondences between Josyph and Paulo Faria (McCarthy's Portuguese translator), Marty Priola (the webmaster for cormacmccarthy.com), Wesley Morgan (a psychology professor with an interest in McCarthy studies), and Nell Sullivan (professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown and the editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal). This wonderfully polyvocal section reveals the variety of ways that we might approach and appreciate McCarthy's work. The most powerful of these centers around Faria's message that his father had suffered a "severe stroke," and writing The Crossing was what helped McCarthy process his trauma. The final section, "Our Rhode Island Shakespeare," more firmly triangulates Josyph in relation to All the Pretty Horses and Hamlet through the figure of the father, Josyph's own father representing an absent presence in his life.

Josyph's book is a testament to the complexity of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. More generally, The Wrong Reader's Guide articulates a love for stories. Anyone can approach any novel in the way that Peter Josyph approaches the first few pages of McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, so long as there is a deeply felt connection between the reader and the book. Of course, while the text wears these rather idiosyncratic shortcomings on its sleeve, one of the interlocutors does commit some egregious offenses regarding the invocation of the Myth of the Vanishing Indian; however, Josyph himself offers remonstration on this point. So this brings us to the question: Who is this book for? While it would not prove...