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.”

In the opening paragraph, Cheever lists the mundane characteristics of Jim and Irene Westcott to underscore the couple’s normalcy. In detailing only one unique trait—the Westcott’s love of “serious music”—Cheever effectively highlights that despite what we will learn about the Westcotts’ neighbors, the Westcotts are no different.

“One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.”

The loss of the music serves as an inciting incident and as a moment symbolic of deeper losses that may be troubling the Westcott home. The broken radio is the first in a chain of linked events that will provide rising action for the story once the new, extraordinary radio is introduced into the home. The loss is described with a profound gravity that intimates a death or a divorce.

“Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that her new radio was among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder.”

This line moves from vivid characterization to an exceptional example of personification. Irene’s painstaking decorum is contrasted with the displeasing physicality of an unwanted appliance that has come to intrude on her space. This description is also ironic in that the radio allows Irene to become an intruder herself.