Wordy and Descriptive, Yet Conversational
O'Connor is really at the height of her stylistic powers in "Good Country People." She begins the story with an in-depth comparison of Mrs. Freeman's face to a truck, followed by an an eight-line sentence (depending on your copy) which Mr. Super-Long-Sentences himself, a.k.a. William Faulkner, would totally be proud of. So right out of the gate, O'Connor's bringing the wordiness and description to this text. Perhaps because Hulga, the protagonist, is a very intellectual character steeped in the complicated language of philosophy, O'Connor's gets a little wild with her style in this story—Hulga can totally keep up.
But while Hulga's the main character, she's not the only character, and a good deal of the style in this book is conversational because, well, there's a good deal of conversation. And since Hulga's the only highly educated character, the style of these conversations is pretty simple and familiar—what we might refer to as conversational if we hadn't already used the word conversation earlier in this sentence.
Sometimes the styles run together, like in this outburst from Manley:
"I hope you don't think," [Manley] said in a lofty indignant tone, "that I believe in all that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn't born yesterday and I know where I'm going!"
"Lofty" and "indignant" are deeply descriptive words—and O'Connor uses two words instead of just one, so there's wordiness at work here, too—but what Manley says is not only technically conversation because he says it in dialogue with someone else, but it also reads the way ordinary people speak, particularly for the time and place the book is set in. So in just this one sentence, we can see the writing style manifest in all its glory. Cool beans.