Character Development:

A Brevard Woman Disappeared... by Michael Kruse is a curious piece of work, and profile, because the main character is deceased. A woman's death is accidentally discovered. The story is a back-in-time unraveling of how this woman could have been dead for 16 months in her own home. The challenge of the reporter was to piece together this woman's life through investigative reporting, heresay, and anecdote. A puzzle he had to reasssemble.

He opens with a set up.  As with Johnny Francis, the author gives us the facts of the story up front and then takes us with him on his hunt to solve the mystery of this woman's lonely life. For 16 months, no one asked where she was. As a reader, we're curious about this seemingly improbable end to a life but we don't want to emulate her tragic end.

The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert, in comparison, proceeds in a polarized direction from Kruse's Bereaved Woman. Where Kruse never met his main character, Gilbert is so intimate with her protagonist one wonders about the actual nature of their relationship.  We are invited to fall in love with Eustace Conway. Gilbert takes great care to build Conway into an American icon and uses his iconic stature to embody a prototypical American male: a rugged independent loner; a forlorn lover with a streak of sentimentality as deep as his sense of alienation from a throng. We are as close as Gilbert is to her character. Through her we are an intimate voyeur into a very private life.

In places she uses colloquial language to reinforce the context of her character "reckoned, learn-ed" and she gets a lot of mileage out of well crafted imagery. By providing his family history, we intuit much about Conway without Gilbert bonking us on the head. I particularly liked the line "Eustace is too hard." People are drawn to Eustace, but no one wants to live his life. I reckon it might be pretty hard for him to wrastle down a woman.