Striking ... Dowling is hardly the first to write that Shepard struggled with his inextricable antagonism for his father ... Dowling’s book doesn’t stop at the men’s 'silverback gorilla' fights, though, as the source of pain. He suggests by analysis and anecdote that Shepard’s conscious performance as a 'man' to deny his father’s deliberate emasculation of him is the source of his tendency to shape-shift, his fundamental slipperiness ... My favorite parts of Coyote take place in the East Village of that time ... So much of Shepard’s writing was literature 'à clef' that Dowling does sometimes take such accounts at their word, leaving us to ferret around in the notes section to figure out where he’s getting his (frequently incredibly personal) information ... [There's] an amazing bit of detective work ... The biography is careful and wise, though it naturally reflects the obsessive qualities of its subject.
Coyote offers intimate shadings on a story that will be familiar to fans of literary biography or anyone who has ever attended a 12-step recovery program ... The author...puts his subject’s journal entries and family correspondences to good use ... Mr. Dowling is a discerning and sympathetic, if occasionally starchy, guide through Shepard’s oeuvre. The connections to O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, in particular, ring true ... While this volume digs deeper still into the mind and adventures of the playwright, eight years gone, you get the sense that there’s more to come.
Penetrating ... Coyote is not the first biography of Shepard, but it is finally the one that an artist of his stature deserves ... Dowling...treats Shepard first and foremost as a writer ... Coyote also benefits from extensive access to Shepard’s intimates, who have avoided prior biographers, as well as to his journals and correspondence, which Dowling quotes to illuminating effect ... Excellent.
Dowling...expertly untangles the history of a man who contained multitudes ... That upward trajectory, and a slow decline of rehashes and breakups until his death in 2017, are abundantly clear in Dowling’s hands. Less clear, though, is what made those works so powerful in themselves, and in the context of their times. Dowling quotes little from Shepard’s plays themselves, more content to focus on critical and audience response. But that disappears a crucial element of a writer who was absurdly compelled to write ... A taste of the macho banter that powered True West and Buried Child might have clarified his particular force as a writer. So, too, might some deeper context about Shepard’s place in the theater landscape ... In that sense, maybe Coyote too much embraces the broad-shouldered American mythology that Shepard both traded in and questioned.
The fact that Dowling gets as far as he does in his attempt to pin down such a rakish devil is commendable. But his exploration of the artistic wages of sin doesn’t go nearly far enough. I was not won over ... Dowling puts far too much emphasis on Shepard’s louche life, neglecting to provide much analysis about the value of Shepard’s work, particularly whether it will endure ... Nor do we gain understanding of Shepard’s artistry by reading about his alcohol-fueled
'benders,' ... Dowling gives short shrift to Shepard’s embrace of the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett ... Dowling offers compassionate insight into Shepard’s last years in Kentucky, the last stop in his restless life, where he succumbed to ALS.
