The most striking quality in McCarthy's style is her way of making characters reveal themselves and comment on one another in interior monologues set in swiftly changing short scenes. As motivation and priorities are revealed, the characters act upon one another to bring extreme notions into balance either through exposure or by example.

As the narrative structure reveals an almost neo-Thomist concern with moderation and the mean, this modern twist on the traditional morality play achieves ironic meaning.

Images and allusions contribute to the blend of modernism and classicism which makes The Group so appealing — Latin tags and the latest cocktails, principles, universals, and general ideas along with jazz singers. McCarthy's outrageous sweeping generalizations — "All the usual disorders of the repressed female brainworker," and "Like many teachers of English, he was not able to think very clearly" (in The Groves of Academe (1952), itself a Horatian setting...