The
Enormous Radio is an example of a genre known as Magic Realism. The story starts out realistically enough as Cheever describes an upper middle class couple, Jim and Irene Westcott. If he’d been writing thirty years later, we would recognize this a prototypical Yuppie couple, obsessed with success and less than connected to their two children.
Then Cheever introduces the enormous radio, which allows the Westcott’s to listen in on the private conversations of their neighbors. Irene’s obsession switches to eavesdropping on these conversations that reveal marital spats,
arguments between parents and children, revelations of criminal
behavior, etc. Gradually, Irene is portrayed as a woman
desperately trying to convince herself that she and Jim are the only ones who are free from this decadent behavior.
Irene’s need for confirmation that they are different finally leads Jim to explode and scream at her. As Irene listens to Jim’s complaints that he is tired, overworked and feels older than he is, Irene recognizes his tone as being no different from those loud arguments she’s been eavesdropping on. It gets worse as Jim turns his attack on Irene, accusing her fiscal extravagance and no sense for managing money. He goes on to make accusations that she has stolen from her dead mother, cheated her sister and, worst of all, had an abortion.
The story ends with Irene by the radio, still in utter denial, desperately hoping for kind words from her husband and fearing that perhaps the radio is broadcasting their sordid
secrets to someone else with a similar radio. Meanwhile, Jim is outside the door, still yelling. The reader is left with the impression that these secrets are being
exposed somehow. If not through the radio, they have certainly been exposed through the story we have just read. In a way, the story itself is also an enormous radio, revealing secrets of characters.
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