OLD KING, by Maxim Loskutoff
Ted Kaczynski may already have been harboring considerable resentments by his second year at Harvard, where the awkward, 17-year-old math prodigy lived in a dorm for similarly gifted students. He was under a lot of pressure from his parents to succeed. He’d skipped grades and missed out on building relationships with peers. He was socially isolated.
All of which makes his selection as a subject for a brutal psychological experiment bewildering. Run from 1959 to 1962 by a former lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services, the Harvard study was a sadistic, egregiously unethical attempt to measure the effects of extreme stress on humans.
Kaczynski, better known today as the Unabomber, was required to write about his personal beliefs, which were then used by an interlocutor to thoroughly demean him as he was monitored by electrodes and filmed. For over three years, Kaczynski subjected himself to hundreds of hours of intense interrogation and ruthless attacks on his most deeply held convictions. Maybe the abuse was a salve for loneliness.
Maxim Loskutoff’s new novel, “Old King,” doesn’t engage much with this formative part of Kaczynski’s life, turning instead to the fury that developed afterward. Loskutoff focuses on Kaczynski’s time in and around Lincoln, Mont., where he lived in his infamous cabin for more than two decades, wrote his manifesto and assembled the bombs that he would use to murder three people and injure 23 more.
Loskutoff’s characters are aptly chosen to illuminate and often voice the grievances that motivated Kaczynski. The evils of ever-encroaching technology and environmental degradation are admirably presented by Loskutoff not as the bugaboos of an unhinged crank, but as real-life conflicts in the ecotone of town and wild country.
Interestingly, Loskutoff doesn’t expound on his themes through Kaczynski as much as he does through the people of Lincoln who toil in the narrative foreground. Poachers are thwarted by an odd couple of animal rescuers. A ranching family with unruly cattle hunt and drink and start fights like the evil princelings they are. And a single father who runs out of gas in Lincoln winds up sticking around, falling for a local waitress and giving his mysterious neighbor Ted the occasional ride.
But that mysterious neighbor is trying to ignite a revolution, and some of Loskutoff’s best prose comes in moments of raw violence. A young man thrown into the air by one of Kaczynski’s booby traps finds himself “untethered from gravity, and terribly free.” And this haunting passage stuck with me for days as a man watches himself blown apart: “That’s my body, he thought, overwhelmed by horror. I need it.”
While Kaczynski’s bombs go off as expected, the man himself is much the cipher. An appearance by a postal inspector tantalizingly suggests the possibility of sleuthing and narrative tension, but Loskutoff’s interests largely remain within Lincoln. Kaczynski’s psychology is mainly rage.
What feels missing are the wherefores behind a program of systematic violence and a manifesto arguing for the destruction of modern life as we know it. Was it the mental torture at Harvard? The industry and development moving in on Lincoln? Or something murkier? I reread Kaczynski’s manifesto and was struck by how banal it is. Many initial reactions were laudatory, but today its core argument seems striking in how revelatory it isn’t. Yes, technology has overtaken our lives, and yes, the natural world is paying a heavy price — but we still want insulin and prescription lenses. Maybe that’s why Loskutoff doesn’t put Kaczynski front and center: He doesn’t have anything to say.
And in “Old King,” Loskutoff seems to suggest that Kaczynski had the same self-assessment. “He felt dizzy,” he writes near the end of the book as Kaczynski imagines his boyhood self regarding him in his craziness. “‘Go away,’ he mumbled, digging his long nails into his scalp. ‘Leave me alone.’”
OLD KING | By Maxim Loskutoff | Norton | 283 pp. | $27.99
