Can a Novel Tell Us How Ted Kaczynski Became the Unabomber?

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.