The Enormous Radio: A Reading, Part 2

John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room No. 29

Part 1 of this essay can be read in John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room No. 28

All that the new radio's arrival presaged in the first half of the story quickly comes to pass in the second half. In the same way the new radio dominated and disrupted the living room, the new radio disrupts and dominates the Westcott's daily routines, small pleasures, and family interactions. The physical ugliness Cheever describes becomes a metaphysical ugliness at the center of Irene's life. She cannot turn the radio off, even though she's horrified and disgusted by what she's learning about her neighbors.

None of this takes the reader by surprise, nor, I argue, is it meant to. In the same way Cheever was hyperbolic about the Westcott's one serious interest, he's hyperbolic about the radio's malevolence. From the moment the new radio is uncrated in the hall and installed in the apartment, the reader's being told that no good will come of this. Rather, the surprise of the story, and its sense of dread, comes from the characters navigating, on the fly, inexpertly, their new reality. We do not expect them to emerge unscathed. In fact, we're expecting to see them fail miserably. The question that keeps us reading is how?

This is a feature of the short story, or the tale, which this story might be better referred to as: the problem is present from the get go, and remains constant, while possible solutions are squeezed by the form's compact size. Although they eventually fix the new radio, potentially returning them to the slightly snobbish peace of their pre-radio lives, the damage has been done. In a novel, let's say, the Westcott's might have a chance to get over the damage, to make peace with the information they learned, perhaps get some marriage counseling and become, maybe, better people. In a novel, they would probably move on to confront the next problem, whatever it might be. We might imagine that the Westcott's will eventually do one or all of these thing after the last page of the "The Enormous Radio," but we have to imagine those situations and outcomes ourselves. In the short story, or tale, there's no time to heal freshly inflicted wounds. Fresh wounds are an essential ingredient to the drama.

In the third section, after a day of listening to the radio report on her neighbors, Irene's raw with emotion. Jim comes home from work to a crisis. Irene demands he go upstairs and prevent a husband beating his wife. Jim doesn't go. Instead, he chides Irene for choosing to listen to the radio. As the scene progresses, it becomes clear that Jim takes Irene's emotional state as criticism of his taste in radios, his initiative, and his quality as a husband. "I bought this damned radio to give you some pleasure," Jim tells Irene. "I paid a great deal of money for it. I thought it might make you happy. I wanted to make you happy." It's a particularly middle-class man-like thing to do, to regard Irene's misery as an attack, and in turn to suggest her misery stems from her own weak will. "You know you don't have to listen," Jim tells her. "You can turn it off."

Irene, for her part, wants reassurance that their immediate world is actually better than the radio reveals it to be. She longs for her old, blissful ignorance, and in particular, seeks reassurance that she and Jim are in fact better than their neighbors. "We've never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean, we've always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven't we?...Our lives aren't sordid, are they, darling? Are they?... And we're not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?"

In these lines, Cheever builds a resonance with the pre-radio characters of Jim and Irene, a couple who shared an interest in serious music, but kept it a secret from those around them. In a form as compact as the short story, or the tale, such resonances become vital to the drama. Instead of growing his characters over time, as a novelist would, Cheever hews close to the essential characteristics set forth in the first paragraph, letting the moment's crisis reveal their flaws.

The radio's fixed the next day, at the beginning of the fourth section. Irene listens to serious music. For her, the crisis appears to be over. Jim, however, comes home looking pale. A serious soundtrack accompanies their dinner and cocktails. "I paid the bill for the radio today," Jim says, a line which begins a tirade that reveals, practically item by item, that Jim and Irene are in fact all that she sought reassurances they were not. They are worried about money. They are not always decent loving to one another. Though Irene responds to Jim's escalating rant compliantly, answering him with "yes, dear, yes," he's determined to fight. Again, Cheever hews close to the characters he described in the opening. This is not a novel in which the characters change; this is a story in which the characters react to crisis. Jim says to Irene: "Where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I'll never forget how cool you were. You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau."

Remember the last sentences of "The Enormous Radio's" opening paragraph: "The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio." The events of the story, including the story's fourth and final section, reinforce the truth of this description. They do spend their time listening to the radio. They are very much like everyone else. And they seldom, if ever, speak of their lives to others. It's the silences—a deep, deadly silence imposed by tranquil, coherent, and shallow surfaces—that allows Jim to weaponize Irene's choices against her. It’s Cheever’s choreography, in his use of structure, pace, and shrewd language, that shows the unhappiness and cruelty Irene feared in her neighbors alive in the Westcotts. It’s the small size of “The Enormous Radio” that in the end devastates the senses.