Franzen Tackles Suburban Parenting In 'Freedom'

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'FREEDOM': FRANZEN'S NOVEL EARNS HIGH PRAISE

DAVID BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli of tvworthwatching.com, sitting in for Terry Gross. Jonathan Franzen's latest novel "Freedom," his first novel since his 2001 bestseller "The Corrections," came out last year with a splash. It was an immediate bestseller and landed Franzen on the cover of Time Magazine.

The New York Times called it a masterpiece of American fiction, but the launch of the novel had its controversy. People started taking sides before the book was even published about whether Franzen and his novel were worthy of all the praise and attention.

It was named a book of the year by leading papers and magazines throughout the U.S. and in England. "Freedom" is now out in paperback. In a few minutes, we'll hear the interview Terry recorded last year with Franzen, but first, let's listen back to what our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, had to say about the book when it was first published.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Why all this adulatory attention, critics ask, for Franzen's latest domestic drama about marriage and family? So many terrific contemporary female novelists cover the same terrain, yet their work receives a fraction of the highbrow fanfare that greets Franzen.

It's like how men still get praise for doing housework and taking care of their own kids: Any male involvement in the domestic realm still merits applause. All true, and yet, even though Franzen gets more praise for doing what many fine women writers do backwards and in heels, in the case of the blandly titled "Freedom," it's well-deserved.

I heretically think "Freedom" is even more powerful than "The Corrections," sections of which I found contrived. "Freedom" is looser and more revelatory and ambitious.

It's the novel, by a man, along with novels by women like Allegra Goodman, Lionel Shriver and the incandescent Sue Miller, that I'd elect to put in a time capsule to give a sense of the texture of middle-class American life to future readers.

The husband and wife at the center of scrutiny in "Freedom" are Walter and Patty Berglund, who meet in college in the '70s. We know that Walter is in for a rough time when we're told at the outset that his most salient quality, besides his love of Patty, was his niceness.

Patty, in the opening paragraphs of the novel, is the reigning stay-at-home mom of her gentrified neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, a crafting and cooking queen. But a crack in Patty's chipper, progressive Democratic demeanor soon surfaces when we learn she slashed the tires of a noisy Republican lout who lives next door.

Soon, all hell breaks loose as the Berglund's adored teenage son Joey literally defects over the fence to live with the neighbor's vacant and sexually voracious daughter. Even worse, Joey will go on to work for shady civilian contractors, supplying defective truck parts to the American forces in Iraq.

And then there's Walter's best friend from college, Richard Katz, an aging bad boy and lead singer of an indie band called The Traumatics. Richard turns up erratically in the Berglunds' life and simply by his very existence reminds Patty that although she married Walter, she was only, at best, somewhat more than sort of into him.

The unspooling of the Berglunds' marriage as they become more and more their destined selves is chronicled through a variety of perspectives, including a brutal but often hilarious therapeutic memoir that Patty writes, entitled "Mistakes Were Made."

One of the great pleasures of reading Franzen's work is savoring how he turns personalities this way and that so that, for instance, from one angle, Patty is a victim, from another she is a shrewish and controlling depressive, and all interpretations are somewhat true.

Even Richard, who could so easily have devolved into a rock-'n'-roll stereotype, is dense and surprising. Because he's a cynic, Richard is also the source of some of the sharpest takes on his friends and the world they live in.

Midway through the novel, Richard achieves mid-level fame. Here are his thoughts about a young girl who won't stop bothering him: She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she'd received. You have permission to ask for things. Your offerings, if you're bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world.

Richard wondered if he'd been this tiring himself at 18 or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world, his perception of the world as a hostile adversary worthy of his anger had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem.

There's not one throwaway scene in "Freedom," and yet, for all that effort, nothing feels overwritten or false. Like "The Corrections," "Freedom" celebrates and extends the possibilities of the good, old realist novel at a time when realism is out of fashion, even in autobiography.

Franzen makes us skeptical postmoderns believe again, if only for a space, that literature really can and should hold a mirror up to the world.

BIANCULLI: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown university. She reviewed Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom," a review we first broadcast last year. The book is now out in paperback.

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FRANZEN TACKLES SUBURBAN PARENTING IN 'FREEDOM'

DAVID BIANCULLI: Now on to Terry's interview with Franzen, recorded last year when the novel was published.

TERRY GROSS, host: I want you to read from the very beginning of the book. It's actually going to start with the second paragraph. Do you want to just set it up before you begin the reading?

JONATHAN FRANZEN: This - it requires only the setup of knowing that in the first paragraph, we are told that we are in St. Paul, Minnesota. And this is basically a couple of paragraphs about young gentrifiers in the early '80s in St. Paul.

(Reading) Walter and Patty Berglund were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill, the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier.

They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for 10 years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt.

Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweat clothes and said: Hey, you guys, you know what?

Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands, ahead of her an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint. And then "Goodnight Moon," then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture and how to encourage feral cats to defecate in somebody else's children's sandbox and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

GROSS: That's Jonathan Franzen, reading from his new novel, "Freedom." So Jonathan, in this novel, you're in part looking at parenting, and you're looking at it from the perspective of several - of a couple of different generations, you know. And you're looking at, in the case of Walter and Patty Berglund, who you just read about, you're looking at how they were parented and what kind of parents they have - they will become.

And I guess I'm interested in why you wanted to write about this kind of arc of family.

FRANZEN: The phrase that pops into my mind is becoming one's own parent, which has several meanings. You - as - I recently passed the age that my father was when I first knew him as a person. Right around the time he was 50, I start having memories of him.

So I find myself, without him around and without parents of my own, feeling like him. And also, since my parents died when I was relatively young, the kind of adult presence in my life that they had provided I've had to learn to provide myself.

And very specifically, I wanted in this book to write about my parents' marriage and their parental experiences as I observed them with myself and my brothers. But I didn't want to set it in the '50s, '60s, '70s. I wanted to set it in times contemporaneous with my own.

So in that way, too, I turned my parents into people my age; into people I might be or I might know. And that was the real engine. It was something that came from inside.

I mean, I know lots of people with kids, and I've watched my friend David Means' kids grow up from, you know, weighing nine ounces to now heading off to college this week. But the primary impulse came from within.

GROSS: There's a part early on when Patty sobs to Walter about her parents: I hate my family. And Walter valiantly replies: We'll make our own family. And they do. They have two children. And it's like you're capturing here, in a way, the fact that some people decide to have children to do it right because they think their parents did it wrong. And then they realize how hard it is to raise children and not make really big mistakes.

FRANZEN: You know, I've been around listening to young parents or would-be parents certainly since I finished college in the early '80s, and it's a refrain you hear: We're going to do it right this time.

You know, Patty's mom never went to her basketball and softball games. Patty's going to be the mom who goes to every single game of her own daughter. You know, her parents ignore her at certain crucial points in fairly brutal ways, and she's going to make herself doubly involved in her own kids' life.

And indeed, goes off as a pioneer to the new frontier in the early '80s, which is the decayed center of old Midwestern cities, and tries to create a better sort of fairy-tale existence, apart from the corruption and the disappointments that she'd grown up with on the East Coast.

GROSS: So she's going to be this active presence in her children's life, a kind of presence that her parents weren't in her life. But for her son, that doesn't really work out.

When we read a chapter from her son, Joey's point of view, we realize that he resents that she's tried to make him her, quote, boy pal and confide in him things that are uncomfortable for him to hear, like the fact that she was date-raped at the age of 17.

And he thinks that she sees his interest in things like Tupac's albums and his favorite TV shows as things that are in competition with her because she wants him to be entertained and fascinated by her. This is his point of view.

And the son thinks that his mother has tried to make him her designated understander. Have you seen that phenomenon?

FRANZEN: I've lived that phenomenon. I mean, there's a certain - in one respect, it was not at all like my own mom, who had practically Victorian notions of propriety, and it was not until the last few years of her life that she really began telling me the kind of stuff that I think younger parents, wisely or unwisely, are confiding to their kids at much earlier ages.

But yeah, it's - you know, you see it with the three or four times a day cell-phoning to grown children that parents my age now do. There's a - there's a quality of we are best pals, which is such a contrast to the sharp, heavily enforced distinction between grownups and children that I'd grown up with.

So I was both channeling something that had happened to me and some of the ways in which I felt oppressed by my mom's needs but also, trying to register it in a contemporary way based on things I'm seeing around me.

BIANCULLI: Jonathan Franzen, speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 2010 interview with author Jonathan Franzen. His latest novel "Freedom" has just come out in paperback.

GROSS: Another thing about the parents, Patty and Walter Berglund in this book, who want to do things differently than their parents did, they don't really know how to be authority figures to their children, especially their son. And Patty complains that her son Joey questions the basis of his parents' authority. And she says: We make him turn the lights out, but his position is that he shouldn't have to go to sleep until we turn our own lights out because he's exactly the same as us.

And then you describe how Walter, the husband, argues with his son over the difference between adults and children and whether a family is a democracy or a benevolent dictatorship. That's probably an argument you would not have had with your parents. They probably would've been the authority, period.

FRANZEN: No, I would've been spanked and sent to bed.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FRANZEN: And, as we're talking, I'm realizing the extent to which the book is a lament for the loss of a distinction between children and grownups. So, having grown up with this intensely meaningful relationship with my parents and having perceived them so much as different from myself when I was a child, I'm particularly sensitive to the loss of that critical distinction in the culture we have now.

And going further, I just finished reading Michael Lewis' terrific book "The Big Short," and there's this great line at the end where one of the traders -who actually made a lot of money on the financial crash of two years ago -says: We kept expecting the grownups to step in at some point and put an end to the fraudulence. And at a certain point, we realized there are no grownups. It goes all the way to the top.

And I was hoping, with this book, to allow some people to become adults. And the key moment of becoming an adult, the difference, one of the defining differences between an adult and a kid is that adults relinquish a certain kind of freedom. You can't lie around on your bed all afternoon, and you can't be possibly any number of things. You have to only be one thing, or a couple of things.

GROSS: Do you feel like an adult?

FRANZEN: Strangely, in the last couple of years, yes. I have come to feel like an adult. I don't really even know when it happened. It's only very recently.

GROSS: Well, how old are you? You're...

FRANZEN: I'm 51. But I still felt like a teenager in many ways as recently as a couple of years ago, and sudden...

GROSS: What changed?

FRANZEN: I wrote this book, I think it's occurring to me now, is probably the biggest thing that changed. There was - the death of my friend David Wallace might have been a part of that, as well.

GROSS: This is the writer, and he...

FRANZEN: The writer David Foster Wallace...

GROSS: ...committed suicide.

FRANZEN: Yeah, a couple of years ago. Just - it wasn't enough to lose my parents. I still was the angry, rebellious teenager who occasionally stepped into the, you know, stern parental role and wrote somewhat forbidding essays about let's not be kids anymore. Let's try to write more adult fiction.

But in the main, as I walked down the street, continued to feel at some level like I was maybe not 16, but 23, and that feeling has suddenly disappeared. And I'm noticing it now, because the last month has been kind of crazy with the pre-publicity and publicity for the book.

And as I sit here this morning talking to you, I'm noticing I feel more like a single person, not a person divided between a teenager and an old man. I feel, actually, about 51, and it's shocking.

GROSS: So what role did the suicide of your friend, the writer David Foster Wallace, have in forcing you or allowing you to cross the line into feeling like an adult?

FRANZEN: Death looks different when you see it in a parent or somebody of your parents' age than when you see it in a contemporary or a dear friend who's even a couple years younger.

It was a limited closeness, but it was a very intense closeness we had as writer buddies, and it was played out mostly in biweekly telephone calls. And I had the sense that I could pick up the phone, call him, and anything I was feeling, however strange, that had to do with the writing life, or negotiating some position for one's self in the culture, all I had to do was start a sentence and he would finish the sentence and say, yep. And I would do the same for him.

And to suddenly have that end and know it was never coming back and feel that as an irreparable loss, the world was no longer opening up ahead of me. I was the surviving person, suddenly. I was the person carrying on.

And, you know, coinciding approximately with turning 50 and feeling how fortunate I was to still be alive and how fortunate I was to still have the capacity to write, I think that had a lot to do with that sudden turn toward feeling my own age.

BIANCULLI: Author Jonathan Franzen speaking to Terry Gross last year. We'll hear more of their conversation in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross. We're listening to an interview Terry recorded last year with Jonathan Franzen, back when his new novel called "Freedom" had just been published. The book was an immediate bestseller, widely praised and landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The novel is now out in paperback.

GROSS: So, reading your book, I get the impression that you think of depression as, like, one of the defining epidemics of our time. Two of the main characters have it, or at least - at least two of the main characters have it. Patty, who's the main wife/mother, actually writes an autobiography at the suggestion of her therapist, and a couple of chapters in the book - in your book - are chapters of this autobiography that she's written. And I want to ask you to do a reading here about depression. And this is from the point of view of Richard, one of the main characters in your book, who is an indie rock songwriter, singer, guitarist. So...

FRANZEN: Yes, who has recently had the traumatic experience of moderate success, and it's particularly galling to him, having been on the margins for so long - not galling, disorienting and, in a weird way, depressing to find himself on NPR, which is a distinction between him and me. I'm very happy to be here.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FRANZEN: Anyway, so this is - I'm just talking about his disorientation following a certain amount of success.

(Reading) Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship, pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness. For Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's.

GROSS: Why did you want to write about depression in your novel?

FRANZEN: People who have a depressive cast of mind are usually the funniest people you meet, and there's nothing like putting a couple of Eeyores into the text to make it at least a little bit funny. What else? Why did I want depressives in here? It's, you know, most interesting people become somewhat depressed at some point in their life, and I'm not writing books for people whose lives are perfectly great. People whose lives are perfectly great probably don't need to read books like the kind I write. Only if you have some regular connection with some kind of darkness or difficulty or conflict does serious fiction begin to matter. And so it's simply realistic to let people, as the stories of their lives build toward dramatic peaks, to enter these dark woods from time to time. And it's really as simple as that. And then because I think it tends to be funny up to a point, up to the point where you need to be hospitalized.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Oh, yeah. That's a riot.

FRANZEN: And, yeah. I know. That's - and that's no joke. And it's important to make that distinction, that there is, you know, a major depression that really shuts you down - anything that brings you in the neighborhood of suicide, anything that suggests hospitalization. That's really a different animal altogether. But the much larger body of people who experience some depression in this country are doing it in ways that are - are feeling it in ways that are very much intertwined with the narrative of their lives.

GROSS: Sometimes I feel like the philosophy I was brought up with is summed up by the Mel Brooks song "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst." And I'm wondering if you were brought up with that philosophy.

FRANZEN: I don't even know if I was brought up with it. I certainly witnessed it in my father, and just suddenly, it began to be genetically expressed in me, I think about the time I finished college, which was the early Reagan years when there was a dark nuclear shadow over everything, and I -yeah. I didn't have to be taught. It didn't have to be modeled for me. It was really almost hardwired.

BIANCULLI: Jonathan Franzen speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to the 2010 interview Terry Gross recorded with author Jonathan Franzen. His newest novel, "Freedom" is now out in paperback.

GROSS: So Patty, in your book, sees a therapist, and at the therapist's suggestion, writes an autobiography. Was that advice you ever got? I mean, you'd be writing one way or another. You don't need a therapist to tell you to write.

FRANZEN: I wanted to write long before I was in need of therapy. But having said that, much of the work on a novel for me consists in the kind of work you might do in a paid professional's office, trying to walk back from your stuck, conflicted, miserable place to a point of a little bit more distance from which you can begin to fashion some meaningful narrative of how you got to the stuck place. And the stuck-ness, for the working novelist - or at least for this one - has to do with not wanting to get into certain intensely fraught or private experiences, feeling that it's absolutely necessary to say things that are absolutely unsay-able.

And I keep trying - I kept trying, through much of the last decade, to access these subjects, these dreamlike relations with important people from my past in direct ways, or I would try to get a character who is sort of like me and had gone through a marriage like I had or who had had parents like I had or had witnessed a marriage like my parents had, and the characters kept collapsing into me. And then I would be overcome with shame, and also a wish not to bare my - every aspect of my private life, and I would shut down.

So there was a lot of self-psychoanalysis, certainly, that goes into the work. And, along the way, becoming depressed - although it certainly feels lousy -comes to be a key and important symptom. It's a flag. And it's almost as if when I start to crash, I know I'm getting somewhere because it's being pushed to a crisis. My whole brain is just like on the brink of shutting down because it's so unhappy with the direction I'm taking things. And that's - it's not...

GROSS: Well, it's interesting that that pushes you to another place, as opposed to leading you a paralysis of depression.

FRANZEN: Right. Well, like I say, I - my father had that Mel Brooks slogan as the refrain of his life. But there was another parent on the scene and, you know, my mother just had boundless energy and she had a much harder life than my father did in many ways. She had bad health all her life but she was - and she would get down but she would just muster from somewhere this Apollonian ability to go on.

And so I, thankfully, could always step back right at the brink and it never turned into, you know, major clinical episodes.

GROSS: So it sounds like for you writing a novel is hard work, not only because you're creating characters and coming up with the right words and organizing a plot and all of that but because you're thinking really hard about contradictions in your own life and trying to work them through in some transformative way in the novel?

FRANZEN: Certainly. Yeah, that's the brief. If I'm just writing about something moderately interesting in using interesting well-turned sentences, it just has no life. It's got to come out of something that's - some issue that's still hot in me, something that is distressing me and there are plenty of things to be distressed about. And for a long time I was able to get a lot of energy onto the page from certain kinds of political distress, environmentalist distress, even aesthetic distress, and that kind of anger has become less interesting to me because it seems like a younger man's game a little bit. And also, the writer is still too well defended. You are armored in your anger. And particularly, in the new book, I tried to let go of that or I found myself letting go of it and went to the deeper, more upsetting things, which were much harder to get onto the page, but whose presence I could feel. I could feel like some, you know, pool of magma beneath the crust, that there is heat down there. If I can only find a way to tap into it, it will make the pages hot in the way they have to be.

GROSS: You said before that you wanted to be able to say the unsayable in your novel, and I'm wondering if you could give an example of something that you've written that you thought of as being unsayable.

FRANZEN: The great thing about novels and the reason we still need them, I think will always need them, is you're converting unsayable things into narratives that have their own dreamlike reality. And instead of having factual statements about what is - here's the factual statement I will never make about myself, I can't make about myself, I'm too ashamed or afraid to make about myself. If that can be translated into characters who feel like they have some independent life, and if they're embodying through their story that informational material about myself, then I feel as if it's been not quite said but it's been enacted.

And if you want an example, I would say what happens to Patty and Walter's son Joey in the course of the book, in spite of how adamantly he's asserting that he's on the same level as his parents, at a certain point, the story, the world puts him in a position where he doesn't know what to do. And suddenly, there comes welling up all of these feelings about both of his parents, maybe particularly his mother, that he's just not prepared to handle. And even though the content that comes welling up in him is not quite not my content, that experience of being the very well-defended young man, who's nonetheless sitting on this impossible stuff, desperately trying to keep it under control, that enacted something that came as close to saying the unsayable as I could in that regard.

GROSS: Jonathan Franzen, it's been great to talk with you again. Thank you so much.

FRANZEN: Thank you, Terry. It's always a pleasure.

BIANCULLI: Jonathan Franzen speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. His bestselling novel called "Freedom" is now out in paperback. You can an excerpt of "Freedom" on our website, freshair.npr.org.

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AN ATMOSPHERIC 'SHELTER' FOR ERA FULL OF FOREBODING

DAVID BIANCULLI, host: Jeff Nichols, a 32-year-old Austin-based writer-director, made a measurable impact with the release of his first film, the revenge drama "Shotgun Stories" in 2007. Four years later, his new film "Take Shelter," won the top prize in the Critics Week competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. Film critic David Edelstein has a review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: It's easy to giggle at the hero of Jeff Nichols' second feature, "Take Shelter." Michael Shannon is Curtis, a crew chief for an Ohio sand-mining company who's ravaged by apocalyptic visions and nightmares. He's wiggy to start with, and increasingly more unhinged on a switchback track to madness that threatens to devastate his family. Curtis sees funnel clouds, locusts, even people staggering through the night like zombies. He knows it might all be in his head: His mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia at about the same age he is now. But in the end, he follows his dreams. He devotes his hours - and the family's little money - to enlarging the storm shelter in his backyard to prepare for whatever's coming.

Curtis is losing it big time - yet his anxieties mirror things in the air right now, from fear of unemployment and tenuous medical coverage, to ever more floods and hurricanes. It's a movie for an era in which the Book of Revelation has made a comeback.

The danger in casting Shannon, with his haunted eyes and history playing demented characters in such films as Bug and "Revolutionary Road," is that his latest unraveling might seem like déjà vu. But the actor is a truly anguished presence, and director Nichols makes sure what's eating Curtis is eating you, too. He breaks down scenes into images of destruction - not just obvious ones, like those funnel clouds and spider webs of lightning across the Ohio fields, but chains and valves and shovels scoring the earth. In many scenes, Nichols and his cinematographer, Adam Stone, evoke the feeling of being inside a house staring out at a deluge - the kind of will-it-never-stop rain that makes even home sweet home seem like an emergency shelter.

"Take Shelter" would seem as obvious as its title if the early scenes weren't so tenderly directed. Curtis' tireless wife, Samantha, who sells homemade crafts at flea markets, is played by Jessica Chastain, an incredibly vivid actress who made a huge impression in last year's "Jolene," and does marvelous work in "The Debt" and even "The Tree of Life," where's she playing a symbol. The couple have a deaf little girl, Hannah, played by Tova Stewart, who's in a lonely world of her own and has a quietly beseeching presence. When Curtis pens the family dog, Red, in the backyard after a bad dream, and puts the money for his daughter's cochlear implant at risk by enlarging that shelter, Samantha finally turns on him.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAKE SHELTER")

JESSICA CHASTIAN: (as Samantha) Not a word. You didn't say one word about this to me. Don't you think you owe me that? Don't you think that you might respect me enough to at least consider what I have to say?

MICHAEL SHANNON: (Curtis) You know, I didn't want you worrying about it.

CHASTIAN: (as Samantha) Well, I'm worried, Curtis. How you paying for all that?

SHANNON: (Curtis) I got a home improvement loan from the bank.

CHASTIAN: (as Samantha) How could you do that without talking to me? You know that we have (unintelligible) coming up. You want to waste money on a stupid tornado shelter?

SHANNON: (as Curtis) I'm doing it for us. I know you don't understand.

CHASTIAN: (as Samantha) You're right, I don't understand. I don't understand half the stuff you've been doing lately. I don't understand you putting Red out back. I don't understand you staying up all night in that stupid tornado shelter. You don't come to bed half the time, you leave, you don't tell me where you're going. Explain that to me. Please. Tell me something that helps me understand why you're being like this.

SHANNON: (as Curtis) There's nothing to explain.

EDELSTEIN: "Take Shelter" didn't come from nowhere. Jeff Nichols' doomsday view was on display in his 2007 movie, "Shotgun Stories," which few people saw but I put on my 10-best list. That film, which also starred Michael Shannon, took place in the South and centered on a tragic feud between two sets of half-brothers. It captured the connection between fatherlessness and the impulse to wreak vengeance like no American film I've seen.

Nichols' feelers are supernaturally acute, but I'm ambivalent about the end of "Take Shelter." I found the movie scarier when it was vague, amorphous - a horror film without a literal monster. But this is still a terrific piece of work. Nichols has composed nothing less than a symphony of modern American bad vibes.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine.

Coning up, I switch to TV critic mode to review three excellent programs televised this weekend: "Prohibition," "Homeland" and "Dexter." This is FRESH AIR.

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WANT GOOD TV? TRY THESE THREE SHOWS

DAVID BIANCULLI, host: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. The 2011 fall TV series has gotten off to a disappointing start, but that's all about to change, beginning this Sunday with a new documentary series, the premiere of a new drama series, and the season premiere of another drama series. All three are excellent, invigorating, and exceptionally intelligent.

The documentary is the latest PBS multi-part presentation by Ken Burns, a three night examination of "Prohibition," which also is the program's title. Burns and his filmmaking partner, Lynn Novick, aren't just riding the "Boardwalk Empire" train here – their story begins a full hundred years before Prohibition began in the 1920s. In fact, they spend the entire first installment explaining how alcohol became a wedge issue, and how religious conservatives, woman suffragists and other groups all used it to gain political power.

This background is fascinating, not dry - and it touches on many subjects Burns has explored before. "Prohibition" opens with a quote by Mark Twain, spends the bulk of its time during the Jazz Age, and, in a segment on the anti-alcohol movement of the 1840s, even finds a link to slavery. And in the same segment, narrator Peter Coyote finds time to reveal the origin of the term teetotaller.

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PETER COYOTE: (as Narrator) The same reformers who were leading the crusade to abolish slavery saw drinking at the damage it did to individuals, families and communities as no less sinful, no less corrupting.

(as Narrator) They called their movement Temperance. At first, advocates preached mere moderation, only ardent spirits like rum and whiskey were off-limits. But soon they began demanding total abstinence from all forms of alcohol, insisting on capital T, Total abstinence.

BIANCULLI: "Prohibition" is another impressive entry in the Ken Burns canon - and yes, it's another history lesson with almost creepy parallels to today's headlines. These include illegal phone taps, political gamesmanship and government programs branded as socialism.

The three segments of "Prohibition" are shown Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights on PBS - with the opening night bumping right up against "Boardwalk Empire" on HBO. That's unfortunate.

And even more unfortunate is that night one, on Sunday, also bumps up against the sixth-season return of "Dexter" on Showtime. That series stars Michael C. Hall as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police department, who's also a serial killer who tracks and kills other serial killers. It's one of my favorite shows on TV. It's also one that seems to get fans who are not caught up, angry whenever I talk about it, even though I'm discussing plot points that happened more than a season before - so this time, I'll stay out of trouble.

This time, I'll say only that season six begins very strongly, and is highly recommended. But even though I won't reveal anything about the shows I've previewed, I will predict the long-time future of this show, just to get it on the record. I believe "Dexter" ultimately will end the same way I believe AMC's "Breaking Bad" will end, with the protagonist ultimately uncovered, and confronted, by a loving relative. In "Breaking Bad," I predict it'll be Walter White's DEA brother-in-law, Hank, who closes in on him. In "Dexter," it'll be Dexter's own sister Debra, who's a cop in the same Miami police department. Both of those characters have strong investigative instincts and even stronger stubborn streaks - so both shows, I'm guessing, are on the same narrative path.

One new show premiering Sunday, following "Dexter" on Showtime, has a narrative path all its own, one I've never seen before in a weekly TV series, and that's saying something.

It's called "Homeland," and stars Claire Danes as Carrie Matheson, a CIA agent who becomes obsessed with Sgt. Nick Brody, an American POW located and rescued after years of brutal captivity in Iraq. Nick, played by Damian Lewis from "Band of Brothers" and NBC's "Life," is about to return home to a hero's welcome. But Carrie, acting on a scrap of vague information, suspects Nick may have been turned while held prisoner, and is now a double agent for al-Qaida. Carrie takes her suspicions to one of her bosses - played by Mandy Patinkin, in a very welcome return to TV - but he's not buying it.

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MANDY PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) You're suggesting that Abu Nazir planted intelligence on his own safe house, just so we could recover Sgt. Brody?

CLAIRE DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) I realize it sounds like a reach.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) To say the least. Why not just drop him here at checkpoint make it look like he escaped. Why would you sacrifice 13 trained fighters?

DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) See what's happening here, he's play the long game. At least and know the suspect's the same.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) Except you.

DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) Yeah. Except me. And Sgt. Brody is due home from Germany tomorrow morning, which gives us just under 22 hours.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) To do what?

DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) To authorize a surveillance package, to tap his phones, wire his house, follow him where ever he goes.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) (Unintelligible) would never sign off on that, you know it.

DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) Well, of course, he won't. That way he'll be the poster boy for the war and they will just serve them up on a platter. That's why I'm coming to you.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) I'm not going over his head. Not on a hunch.

DANES: (as Carrie Anderson) But if I'm right, if he is a terrorist, we need eyes and ears on Brody from the minute he steps off that plane.

PATINKIN: (as Saul Berenson) Never happen.

BIANCULLI: If Carrie is right, she's the real hero of this story. If not, Nick's not only the victim - he's the hero, too. For the first few episodes of "Homeland," our loyalties are split, and we don't know which character to root for, only that they're both played by incredibly likable and sympathetic performers. And watching Carrie pursue Brody, without being certain of his true motives, puts a fascinating new twist on an otherwise familiar tale.

Eventually, we will discover the truth, and the series, and the drama, will continue from there. But for right now, "Homeland" is offering something unique to television. And when you're talking about television, that's a phrase you don't hear very often. Just in time, thanks to "Homeland" and "Dexter" and "Prohibition," the 2011 TV season is looking up - and looking good.

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BIANCULLI: You can join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair. And you can download podcasts of our show at freshair.npr.org. For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

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BIANCULLI: On the next FRESH AIR, C. Peter Wagner, a leading apostle in the New Apostolic Reformation. Its missions include dominion, taking leadership positions in government, education, business and the media, and evangelizing cities by conducting spiritual warfare against demons. Several apostles affiliated with the movement helped organize or spoke at Rick Perry's prayer rally. Join us.

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Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.