"The Enormous Radio" is a departure from Cheever's hitherto " naturalistic-realistic narratives" into a whimsical invocation of a fall from grace and the catastrophic consequences of self-knowledge.[10] Biographer Patrick Meanor writes:
"The Enormous Radio" is Cheever's earliest and most brilliant version of the "fall" from innocence into experience, from blissful ignorance into the horror of self-knowledge, and from a comfortable life of illusion into the unbearable reality.[11]
Meanor adds that the radio serves as "an agent of revelation" which, stripping the Westcotts of their self-complacency, leaves them bereft of their "urban Eden", intimately bound up with the idea of the house, gender, and family, which becomes through metaphor, a way of externalizing the inner life of fictional characters.[12][13]
Writer and Critic Tim Lieder notes that the story is an early experimental story from Cheever and technically magical realism. He also points out that it inspired a Billy Crystal story in Playboy magazine about a man who watches his neighbors on his cable. For Lieder, the most important part of the story was the miserable marriage that is only momentarily interrupted by the chance to eavesdrop on their neighbors. [14]
