his main influence for “The Enormous Radio,” but when Dodie Merwin first read the story, she immediately recognized Cheever's own peculiar anecdotal style: “He had the most hilarious sense of going on tangents. He would build this absolutely perfect portrait of the times and the places and the people—and all of a sudden it would shoot offsomewhere.” Consider the opening lines of “The Enormous Radio”: “Jim and Irene Westcott 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. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in West-chester.” Rather than dramatize the Westcotts’ ideal ordinariness with a lot of tedious narrative detail, Cheever simply states the matter with a droll statistical flourish (“10.3 times a year”). The only way the couple deviates from the norm, he informs us, is in their extravagant love of music, hence the need of a brand-new radio. Thus, as Irene Westcott settles down to listen to this ungainly machine, Cheever goes off on one of his tangents: “A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. … [S]he began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner.” This is Kafka's approach, too: Before the reader can object to the idea of a man transformed into a dung beetle, the thing has been done with absolute naturalism, from Gregor Samsa's “armor-hard back” to the “rigid bow-like sections” of his abdomen. And so with Cheever's radio: a hot “crackling” is precisely the sound a radio makes (circa 1947) when changing signals, but the description also resonates with infernal overtones, as Irene discovers that this particular radio allows her to eavesdrop on neighbors. “Irene shifted the control and invaded the privacy of several breakfast tables. She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair.”
The story is typically interpreted in terms of Edenic myth—the satanic radio bestows on the Westcotts the knowledge of evil—and one supposes this was fine with Cheever, whose main objective was to “put things down as they appear and to leave the spore of myth and allusion to the reader.” He knew his fanciful exaggerations had mythic dimensions, and so be it; however—quite like Kafka—he deplored his work's being reduced to “banal allegory.” In the case of “The Enormous Radio,” the obvious Edenic gloss doesn't quite fit—unlike Adam and Eve, the ultra-normal Westcotts have always been corrupt, and the radio simply reminds them of this: “You made Grace Howland's life miserable”—-Jim Westcott berates his wife toward the end of the story—”and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? … You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau.” And finally, once the radio is “fixed,” it still insists on confronting the traumatized pair with the hopeless suffering of a fallen world: “The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. ‘An early-morning railroad disaster in Tokyo,’ the loudspeaker said, ‘killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.’ “
“The Enormous Radio” was included in that year's Best American Short Stories, and was also selected for a Best of the Best volume published a few years later. More gratifying, perhaps, was Mary Cheever's reaction: “It made a big difference in how I felt about the man I was married to and how he was spending his time.” From then on—while the evidence mounted—she would have to consider their marital and financial woes in the context of caring for a potentially