The Enormous Radio (1947). Summary and Description

“The Enormous Radio” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1947 and was subsequently published as part of Cheever’s second short story collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). This story helped to solidify Cheever’s reputation as a modern literary innovator and to build his popularity; this is his most often reprinted work. As do many of his works, this relatively early story blends fantasy with real aspects of modern family life.

“The Enormous Radio” takes place in the bustling, socially conscious suburbs of New York in the 1940s, presumably just after World War II, when Americans sought the economic prosperity, the comforts of consumerism, and the social capital that wealth confers upon its possessors. The third-person omniscient narrator introduces the protagonists, Jim and Irene Westcott, with the blandness and inhuman description of a statistical analysis, using phrases like “[they] were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins” and “they went to the theater on an average of 10.3 times a year.” On the surface, Jim and Irene are average Americans who strive to improve their economic situation, to preserve their marriage, and to conform to all the social demands placed on them as upwardly mobile individuals.

The one characteristic that separates the Westcotts from their neighbors and friends is the “interest they share in serious music,” which they try to conceal, apparently because this interest makes them somehow different from others. When the Westcotts’ old radio quits functioning, Jim purchases a new radio as a surprise for Irene. When she arrives home, Irene sees the new radio with its “malevolent green light” as an “aggressive intruder” among her hand-picked home furnishings. The radio functions properly for a few moments before interference—the sound of telephones ringing, electric razors buzzing, and vacuum cleaners humming—overwhelms the music. Here, Cheever demonstrates how modern life, with all its conveniences, intrudes upon even our most private spaces.

The next day, Jim has the radio fixed. When the couple turns on the radio during dinner, instead of interference they unwittingly begin to overhear their neighbors’ troubles through the radio’s speakers. Though Jim has been too tired “to make even a pretense of sociability” and Irene has been consumed by disinterestedness during dinner, the opportunity to listen in on the trials and private lives of their neighbors piques their curiosity, and the couple spends the evening hours in front of the radio until they are “weak with laughter.” At this point, it is clear that Jim and Irene’s discussions rarely venture outside the self-deluded, safe conversations of a couple married for a long time. In contrast, the radio broadcasts the very volatile and emotional conversations of their neighbors, which eventually force Irene to acknowledge how little she really knows and understands about her relationship with Jim.

As the story progresses, Irene becomes obsessed with the radio conversations. The narrator never describes Irene’s putting the kids to bed or kissing Jim as he heads off to work; instead, we see Irene’s leaving a luncheon early, wondering what secrets her lunch date is concealing, only to go home to listen in on her neighbors. When she and Jim attend a dinner party that night, Irene is again tormented by her suspicions about the private lives of others as she stares at the dinner guests with “an intensity for which she would have punished her children.” Finally, Irene’s obsession with her neighbors’ lives via the radio drives her to begin to question her relationship with Jim. She begins to wonder whether they too live “sordid” lives, full of passions and pain that they try to hide from one another and, in turn, that they both refuse to acknowledge, choosing instead to measure the worth and value of their lives against only the social and economic situations of their friends and neighbors.

In the last scene, Jim berates Irene for her spending, which is also the topic of many of the radio conversations, even blaming her for purchasing the radio. He goes on to list Irene’s past misdeeds: “You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her—not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland’s life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I’ll never forget how cool you were.” Up to this point, the episodic nature of the story and the narrator’s choice of details have prevented us, as readers, from seeing how Jim and Irene interact.

Most of the reported conversations revolve around relatively trivial matters unless, of course, the conversations are heard over the strange radio. Several critics have noted how this story relates to the Eden story in the Bible, with the radio bestowing a form of new knowledge upon Irene, allowing her to see her everyday life in a new way that she never considered before. The radio, whether magical or possessed or simply malfunctioning, changes her view of the world, and she becomes nervous and preoccupied with the semblance of her own morality and her relationship with Jim.

In keeping with his tendency to blend fantasy and reality, Cheever’s story concludes as Irene wants to hear comforting words over the radio after her argument with Jim; instead, she hears a regular news broadcast: “An early morning railroad disaster . . . killed twenty- nine people. . . . The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.” This broadcast serves to ground the story in the world, where the radio, a real object, changes the way that Irene has naively seen life in her subjective reality. Her self-constructed world’s facade of probity and moral conformity is forever cracked, and through this crack, Irene sees the ugliness, uncertainty, and self-absorption that lie beneath the smooth surface of social interaction and even the intimate relationship she shares with Jim.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Read several literary works that blend fiction and the fantastic, works we often refer to as magical realism. Good examples include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Circular Ruins.” Finally, write a well-developed essay that defines magical realism, drawing upon Cheever and other magical realism writers.

2. Several critics have noticed the similarities between “The Enormous Radio” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Both stories blend fantasy and reality, and both stories question the nature of reality and the validity of individual perception. Read “Young Goodman Brown” and focus on the events or objects that cause Goodman to question his assumptions about his neighbors and that cause him to seek outward signs of their secret guilt. Compare and contrast Goodman and Irene. What does each of these stories tell us about our own self-constructed realities? About public identity? About society and social interaction in general?