"The Enormous Radio" represents a significant advance in Cheever's "style, fictive voice, and tone."[5] Biographer Patrick Meanor writes:
"The Enormous Radio" and "Torch Song", much longer, more psychologically sophisticated stories, eventually came to be to be considered two of Cheever's greatest and most popular works, not only for his new, highly developed lyrical style and brilliant character portraiture, but also his ability to evoke deep mythic resonance within the most mundane circumstances.[6]
Biographer John E. O'Hara considered these works 'landmark stories", and "The Enormous Radio" in particular "perhaps the most imaginative story Cheever ever wrote."[7] O'Hara comments on Cheever's skill in exploiting its "thematic possibilities":
The animation of inanimate structures is an ancient literary device, [but] few writers have been able to achieve the intensity of effect that Cheever creates in "The Enormous Radio." Blending realism, fantasy, comedy and pathos, and carefully manipulating these elements into a structure, Cheever illuminates some the darker regions of the human psyche.[8]
O'Hara adds that "The Enormous Radio" "ventured into something approaching existential awareness and raised serious ethical questions about personal involvement and self-delusion in the lives of his characters."[9]
