Alther writes comedy of manners in the tradition of Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker and, more recently, Nora Ephron. More noticeable, however, has been her ability to identify herself as a chronicler of generations, of particular place and time. Although the flashback to Clea and Turner's college years — as Greeks, of course — and their sexual adventures and sexual politics is only part of the Bedrock saga, the evocation of Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) is uncanny — the fads, fancies, driven women, remote men, comical sex, as are the echoes of Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972) and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973), other icons of the 1970s.

Alther's particular mixture of conservative satire — to be a fanatic about anything is bad form — and sexual adventurousness is in the tradition not only of McCarthy, but her lesbian eroticism plugs into a tradition...