Just wandering through the library, I decided to grab a new and different book. “Here’s John Cheever. I’ve heard of him. Says here this book won the Pulitzer.”
So, I pick up The Stories of John Cheever, and it’s pretty good so far. I actually quite enjoyed the story “The Enormous Radio.” It’s about a couple in an apartment building who liked listening to the radio, but theirs was not very reliable. So when it finally gave out on them, the husband went out and bought this monstrosity of a machine that seemed to pick up every bit of electrical interference it could. The elevator, electric razors, mixers, washing machines – just about anything electronic in the building would cause static. So they had it “fixed,” and then it started to pick up the conversations and happenings of other apartments in the building.
Over time, the wife becomes obsessed with listening to all of these things, until she’s convinced that everyone else is leading secretly horrible lives. She collapses in her husband’s arms when he comes home from work one day, pleading with the hope that their lives are not that way too. “Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we’ve never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean, we’ve always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven’t we? And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren’t sordid, are they darling? Are they? We’re happy, aren’t we darling?”
“Of course we’re happy.”
The husband promises to “have that damned radio fixed or taken away,” and that ends it. It is repaired the next day and becomes a normal radio.
But later that day, the husband returns home to tell his wife that he’d paid the bill for the radio – four hundred dollars. “Four hundred dollars is a good deal more than I can afford,” he tells his wife. And on top of that, she’d lied about paying her clothing bills, and now he’s very worried about money and what would happen to the children if something happened to him…and they fight. And it seems their lives truly are sordid and tragic after all.
Brilliant. Thoughtful. Interesting. I can’t say that Cheever is an absolute favorite. Not yet. But he’s certainly good. And the format of the book is such that I can just read it without much investment. Good stuff for when I don’t have the time to read a lot. I’ll give it a 7 out of 10 for now, and expect it to get even better.