Despite how obvious it may appear to be, “The Enormous Radio” is not really about voyeuristic excess. Although the story contains all the elements of one of Hitchcock’s good movie about voyeurism like Vertigo or Psycho, the real Peeping Tom victims here are not the neighbors of the Westcotts, but the Westcotts themselves.
No, not in the sense that they almost certainly are due their comeuppance by discovering that their neighbors have also been listening on on them. That would be fodder for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like a good Hitchcockian thriller, however, the enormous radio is simply a Maguffin here. A device to pulling back the curtain of normalcy and nicety to reveal the rottenness at the core of this couple’s middle classic utopia. Something is dirty here and it’s not the linen of the neighbors. The stench of filth is streaming from the closets of Jim and Irene. What Cheever is really revealing is not that our neighbors lead dirty little lives we know nothing about. Ultimately, we are all forced to come face to face with the end of the innocence. The innocence that many of us do not necessarily let go of is darker and more disturbing and on full display in the final scenes of the story
The early description of Jim Westcott is the key to unlocking the fundamental mystery of what this story is actually about. Cheever’s narrative informs us that Jim is “earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve.” That’s just fancy author talk for the psychological defense mechanism of denial. Jim and Irene—and by extension all their neighbors—are voyeurs peeping into their own windows. They all know what sordid little dramas are being played out behind those curtains, but like any good Peeping Tom: they keep it to themselves by denying to themselves that it ever even happened at all. Why share something you have convinced yourself never happened?
And that, in the final analysis, is the message at the center of this deceptively simple story. Why share the darkness of your own life when you don’t have it? Just hope that nobody out there is also peeking in and forcing you into a situation where one day you may have to admit the truth.
