The Difficult Lesson of the Enormous Radio"The Enormous Radio" by John Cheever begins with Jim and Irene Westcott who are an average American couple with an average American family. Cheever describes them as middle-aged, with two young children, a nice home and a sufficient income. On the surface they seem to have a perfect life, but underneath that is not the case. Over the course of the story, Irene's imperfections are exposed by a hideous radio. The radio was purchased to give the Westcotts listening pleasure, but then they discover that it can hear all the neighbors' conversations. Irene becomes so obsessed with eavesdropping on her neighbors' conversations that it blinds her to her own problems. It seems like Irene's life is innocent and she does a good job of keeping it as perfect as possible. Cheever describes how he selects "the furniture and colors of his living room as carefully as his own" (817). The radio did not fit into his decorations, so he considered it “among his intimate objects as an aggressive intruder” (817). Burton Kendal stated that “Even before the radio begins to broadcast conversations from nearby apartments, its mere presence in the house oppresses the atmosphere” (128). This is a clue to the reader that the radio was not only an interruption to Irene's furnishings, but also to her life. When Irene became obsessed with the radio, "she began to feel depressed, instead of happy as she once was." state" (Jordan 57). The radio revealed to her the most intimate and private secrets of her neighbors' lives. It showed conversations that no one would share with others. As Jim states to his wife, "It's indecent. It's like...half of paper...in his community. According to Giordano, the Westcotts' "live, on a grand scale of events, were just another example of ordinary life in a other apartment in another city" (58). Irene has the radio on and turns around hoping that "the instrument will speak to her kindly," but "the voice on the radio was gentle and vague" (829). This reveals that the daily life continues and everyone has daily problems, including Irene. Ultimately, Irene's attempts to hide her problems fail. She realizes that everyone has problems and that you can't avoid them by putting on bandages only let's solve our problems and not deal with the fact that no one has a perfect life. Work cited Cheever, John "The Harper Anthology of Fiction" Ed New York: HarperCollins, 1991.