In 1947, John Cheever wrote a story called “The Enormous Radio,” published in the New Yorker, available here as originally printed and here as a pdf.
Cheever, of course, was famously referred to as the “Chekhov of the suburbs” and known for his careful depictions of a kind of realistic, mostly white, East Coast, upper middle-class life, (though his characters lived in an economic range now seemingly increasingly out of reach, for so many…with maids and swimming pools and drink carts and the rest). We think of him as a realist.
In “The Enormous Radio,” Cheever writes:
Jim and Irene Wescott 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 theater on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Wescott was pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair, and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written…
In the middle of all this portrayal of bland normalcy, a new radio becomes “an aggressive intruder” in the Westcotts’ living room. Instead of classical music, the radio transmits the intimate arguments of neighbors, repetitious piano practice, and the bitterness and voices of children and nannies…seemingly good lives are displayed as sordid by laying ordinary domestic details bare…it’s TMI, in candid shots and accidental recordings…
All of the Westcott’s intake of classical music and gentle, civilized arts are interrupted by the harsh reality of basic human existence.
The story is worth checking out.
I’ve been thinking about the “Enormous Radio” lately, because I bought a very cheap laptop.
I don’t buy new tech often. I’d prefer to be a Luddite, but I live in this world, alongside everyone else, and my computer is old, old, old…The new laptop? It’s come loaded with pre-selected news sites mixed with ads. Each box on the screen flashes a portal to a sordid, sad and I’d say gratuitous story aimed at drawing in the masses, fast. I’m sure you know the scene…
Sometimes, like the Westcotts, I can’t help but listen, click, read…then the algorithms double down, feeding me more….children, women, men, animals, all mistreated, in a world falling apart….dammit!
Is every laptop, computer and phone now Cheever’s enormous radio, hijacking a day, a mind, a worldview?
I’ve been thinking about that line where science fiction, and seemingly speculative work, intersects with realism, so swiftly.
We live at the border of What-If?
Cheever was considered a realistic writer. With “The Enormous Radio” and a few other stories, he took a foray into speculative fiction. He asks what we might feel, if a new piece of the technology of the day brought us, unwillingly, too close to our neighbors, too close inside the lives of acquaintances and strangers, too often? How would the lives of others shake, shape or otherwise speak to our own broken humanity?
Now, of course, we do it all the time, glimpsing lives online, sometimes curated, sometimes melting down.
I first read “The Enormous Radio” in the late 1980’s, about 40 years after it was written…and here I am, still thinking about this short story in 2022, 75 years after Cheever published the work.
That is a powerful set of words! Cheever offered a lens for considering the trash and grief callowly spoon-fed to the world through ambient, highly controlled mass media.
Literature can break through the unchecked illusion, over time and space, taking us into the world of ideas, right?
Quick Note (Bear With Me):
If you like thinking about writing and stories, and perhaps considering how writing saves us, letting us write the stories of our own internal lives, real or imagined, our own vision—and how literature might let us all, individually and collectively, retain our humanity—perhaps consider joining this upcoming Sunday writing class.
The class starts this week! 10/23.
Where: Online
When: Sunday Morning, 10:00 PST
Dates: 10/23-11/13
Cost: $285
Aimed at conveying ideas of the writing craft, while having fun and getting going, at all levels of experience.
Online Writing/Craft Course | monicadrake
It’s coming up quickly…if you’re interested, or if you know anyone who wants to add this dimension to the weekend…sign up and/or pass word along!
I’m going to promote the class a few times in the next few days, just to make sure I’ve gotten the word out. Apologies in advance! Ha!
One more thing—I appreciate comments from you all! It’s great to hear from you.
Enjoy the day, okay?
Monica
That's great! I read that story in high school and really liked how he depicted the growing obsession with the neighbors as a substitute for having a real life. The Fourth Alarm tells much the same story, though with a killer ending. He definitely had a vibe going in his early stories.
It happens that I was reading some Cheever this weekend, "Goodbye My Brother." I came onto it through reading Frederick Busch's collection of letters from writers to other writers. In that book, Malcom Cowley was writing a then-young Cheever about the story (which Cheever considered a failure). Cowley told him how much he liked it, advising Cheever to not take the whole "what does this mean" idea so seriously. He rightly points out that story is driven by character and event, and that the focus on Deeper Meaning was often a pretentious exercise in superimposition.
I found the story pretty hilarious, especially the depiction of the drunken mother staring past her nose and remarking that if there was an afterlife she would be sure to have much better children.
Looking forward to the class this weekend!