John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"

Image by Miran Lesnik from Pixabay

There is a distinctly American fear; the fear of being average. In John Cheever’s short story, “The Enormous Radio”, Jim and Irene Westcott pride themselves on rising above their average, “income, endeavor and respectability” with their shared interest “in serious music.” When their radio fades in the middle of a Schubert quartet, Jim decides to purchase a new one. The new radio is not only larger than Irene anticipated when delivered but she is “struck at once with the physical ugliness” of it. It doesn’t match her other furnishings and she looks upon it as “an aggressive intruder.” When she plugs it in the dials are “flooded with a malevolent green light.”

Cheever presses the limits of realism when the radio proves to be defectively magical; this radio can tune in to the other apartments in the building. As the Westcotts switch between the stations, they can hear the intimate conversations of their neighbors; the British nanny reading her charges in 17-B, a drunken cocktail party they were not invited to in 11-E and the Osborns having a row in 16-C.  

Irene Wescott fixates on the lives of others; so much in fact that she cuts a luncheon date short and wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to the radio. She becomes obsessed.

Cheever takes a long time to get us there. He describes the minutiae of their mundane life in lavish detail; the cocktail hour, the maid giving the children their suppers and baths, and the nightly changing of clothes for dinner until we see the Westcotts as they are---boring. Listening to the lives of others is the most exciting part of their day.

Jim has enough when he comes home to a hysterical Irene, insisting he go up and stop Mr. Osborn from beating his wife. “You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off,” he tells his wife, “I bought this damned radio to give you some pleasure.” The next day he calls for the radio to be repaired.

When he returns home the radio is playing Debussy and not the Sweeney’s nurse. The Westcotts sit down to listen and immediately begin to argue. The quarrel soars and the story ends with Irene standing before the “hideous” radio hoping that she might hear another apartment instead of her own.

“The Enormous Radio” was published in The New Yorker in 1947 but reads as contemporary. In an age where reality television, Twitter, Facebook, live streaming and Zoom cams give a window into how other’s live, Cheever’s radio does in fact seem realistic. In many ways, the story is prophetic, showing the reader what happens when we both listen in on things meant to be private and compare ourselves to others. By obsessing on the details of their neighbors lives, the Westcott’s became the very thing they were afraid of becoming---average. They can no longer enjoy the one thing that set them apart, music and are now arguing just like the rest of their neighbors.

Human depravity is a theme in Cheever’s stories. After listening to the radio Irene had “looked searchingly at her friend” during a lunch date “and wondered what her secrets were.” She is no longer content for in person companionship but longs to meddle in private lives and secrets. “I thought [the radio] would make you happy,” Jim says to Irene.  But it doesn’t. “I’ve been listening all day and it’s so depressing,” she tells him.

Cheever is better suited for showing us the chaos than he is at finding a solution. Yet even in the midst of madness he gives us a glimmer of hope. On a walk home from dinner, before the quarreling and before the radio is fixed, the Westcotts come across a Salvation Army band playing “Jesus is Sweeter.” Irene stops them to listen and her husband notice’s “a look of radiant melancholy that was not familiar with.” “They’re really such nice people, aren’t they?” she says before dropping some money for donation. As if foreshadowing hope in her own story and giving us a glimmer into Cheever’s thoughts on humanity, Irene remembers a little refrain as she gazes upon the evening’s stars “How far that little candle throws its beams, so shines a good deed in a naughty world.”