How Unabomber Ted Kaczynski loomed in the mind of an ‘obsessed’ novelist

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been on Maxim Loskutoff’s mind for a long time.

The author grew up in Missoula, Montana, less than 80 miles from Lincoln, the town near the shack where Kaczynski lived and constructed the bombs that killed three people and hurt nearly two dozen others. Loskutoff was 11 when Kaczynski was arrested; the mathematician-turned-terrorist would later plead guilty to murder and be sentenced to life in prison without parole. Kaczynski took his own life last year.

Loskutoff, the author of the short story collection “Come West and See” and the novel “Ruthie Fear,” says that he wasn’t surprised when it turned out the feared Unabomber made his home in Montana.

“I was 11 when he was caught,” he says. “It clarified what I had seen on class trips, where we’d go to a place where some outlaw died violently, or where a bank robber was hanged. When I was a kid, the ethos of the Interior West was a national release valve, a place where people who were escaping their lives could come to reinvent themselves or to live outside the law.”

Loskutoff decided to make Kaczynski a character in his third book, “Old King,” published by W.W. Norton. The novel follows Duane, a man who moves near Kaczynski’s shack in 1976, when the bomber was engaged in a sabotage and booby-trapping campaign against his neighbors. Duane learns to fear Kaczynski, although the two share a love for the old-growth forest around them.

Loskutoff talked about “Old King” via telephone from his home in western Montana. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: This is your third book that takes place in the American West. Do you find the way that you’ve written about the West has changed since you published “Come West and See”?

Definitely. When I was growing up, there was this sense that the West that I knew was overlooked. I grew up reading a lot of books in which the West was portrayed as either heaven or hell. You had the pastoral books where the only thing that marred the magnificence of the West was the shoddy people within it, or you had sort of the Cormac McCarthy version where the West was a stand-in for hell itself, this place where judgment day is being played out. There was also a lot of space in the social classes that were being portrayed. 

The tension between the various classes and the landscape itself really motivated me in my first two books. It felt like the tension and anger and confusion that I felt living in the West and growing up in the West hadn’t been expressed in culture, and as such, it felt like it was very much in danger of boiling over. As I get older, a lot of that panicked feeling diminishes; this sense of “I need to be the one to warn people” goes away, and it becomes more of an examination of what is in me, and what is in all of us who live in the West, that makes the relationship so complicated.

Q: Were you writing this book when Ted Kaczynski died last year?

I was toward the end. It was really surreal, because he took his own life the day that I turned in my final draft. I was turning this book in, and beginning to ask the question of, “This person is still alive; what are they going to think about this book?” That was something I’d really tried to isolate myself from as I wrote. It felt necessary to have this real character casting a shadow over this fictional world because of what he represented to me in terms of the mythology and in terms of having a real person that people could latch onto in order to understand that. But it was a haunting moment.

Q: What made you decide to have him be a character in this book in the first place?

The main rule I have for myself as a writer is to trust in my own obsessions, and he was an obsession since my childhood. I didn’t really think of Montana as anything except home, and as such, I was just sort of inventing the story of it. And the story I invented was of these woods with monsters lurking within them. So when he was caught, it was this validation that there was a dark presence in these woods. And he continued to haunt me because the reaction to him was so complex, both nationally and for myself. It was really confusing to me as a kid who this person was and exactly what he had done.

He’d gone to Harvard, which was very kind of otherworldly and impressive to me as a kid in Montana. He had a connection to the environmental movement. And there was the strangeness of his war on technology; he was this anti-technology person who spent all of his time obsessing over creating these little pieces of technology that he used to kill people. So there was just all this kind of complexity that kept bringing me back to that figure. And for me, that’s kind of the richness of fiction when you have all these questions that you can’t quite answer, but you can’t stop thinking about, and that was who he was for me.

Q: Was there anything unsettling about trying to get inside the mind of someone like Kaczynski?

Absolutely. The reason the book took me so many years to finish, and lived for so long as an itch I couldn’t scratch, was because I didn’t know how to position him. I knew that I didn’t want to write a book in which he was the hero or even the anti-hero, and because he is such a big presence, that was very hard to avoid. How do I keep the camera from being overly focused on this person who in the end was monstrous? 

It took me a long time to figure out that the sense that I wanted to capture was the sense that I had had of him, which was just this shadow lurking over a community, over a state, and in the end, over an entire country, and through really learning a lot about the community of Lincoln itself, and the petty cruelties that he inflicted on his neighbors over the 25 years that he lived there. I realized that that was my entry point into the book — it was more about the monstrosities that he was inflicting on his neighbors in this small town, and the people who lived next to him for years who had to deal with that in their own lives. They were really the heroes of this story because even though they lived next to this incredible cruelty, they didn’t become it themselves.