Can the American West Save Us?
Maxim Loskutoff discusses his novel "Old King"
Every few months I look at flights to Montana. I scroll through various search engines trying to find a way to make a trip to Big Sky Country feasible. I look for various permeations: alone, with my wife, and with my wife and kids. Each time I become overwhelmed by the possibilities and the potential travel.
Montana looks mythical on a map and it feels like a place that could consume me. I’d want to live out my days there forever, staring at the endless scenery and feeling the gravity of a place that still holds some wilderness.
This feeling and this desire has long been an obsession of the American psych. We’ve made countless movies and novels about the beautify and horror of westward expansion the nature of it. It’s an idea that served as the tableau for some of Cormac McCarthy’s most cherished work. It influenced Italians like Sergio Leone. And, for me, the American West is embodied in Montana. It’s a place that swells with Jim Harrison lyricism. And it once enchanted Theodore John Kaczynski, better known as Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski.
All of these ideas come together in Maxim Loskutoff’s novel Old King, which swirls around a young Kaczynski and the changing world that the domestic terrorist feared and hoped to halt. The story follows a few different characters who find their way to small town Montana in search of something. That something is mostly purpose. Each character wants to find the meaning of their life and their place in the universe of a changing world. Loskutoff grew up in Montana and has seen every kind of person move there looking for their own answers and he uses that back drop to tell the story of modern America and how we’ve been consumed with meaning and how some are more interested in stopping progress in any way necessary. In Old King, Loskutoff brings the myth of the West and the American spirit to life.
Old King is Loskutoff’s second novel. Ruthie Fear was his first. He also wrote the story collection Come West and See. He lives in western Montana, where he was raised. He recently wrote an essay about Kaczynski for The New York Times. We spoke via phone while he was spending time in a small town somewhere in Montana.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
So where are you right now? Where is this little town in Montana? Where are you lost to the wilderness?
I'm in [deleted], Montana, at the moment. It's gorgeous. The Big Hole Valley is a kind of remote spot in southwestern Montana with a lot of incredible wilderness. And it seems to be the healthiest choice for me when there's a book coming out, and all kinds of information coming in, to sort of retreat somewhere like this and only check my email for an hour a day rather than every five minutes.
So do you have a place down there?
No. I've got a van. We're actually heading home today, but my partner and I have been camping for the last two weeks, just moving around.
You do the opposite of what everybody else does.
Yeah, I do the opposite of what any logical person would do. Yeah.
So do you avoid press? Is that what you're saying?
No, I mean, I just avoid the sort of neuroses that awakens in me if I find it too accessible in the moment, if that makes sense. I try to say “yes” to everything I can and embrace all the opportunities, but I also know I have a tendency to sort of obsess in the moment and the balance of being out in nature and kind of coming in for an hour of service a day is much healthier for me.
Hearing you talk about going into the wilderness and kind of escaping, I'm wondering what was the first nugget that you got for this book? What was the first scene you got where this started? Because it is almost similar to you people trying to get away from everything and the noise.
The book began really with imagining the experience of being a really ordinary young person and opening up a bomb. I had been really fascinated by the Unabomber story for most of my life because it was a really defining moment of my childhood. I was 11 when he was caught and it was the first time that I saw how the rest of the country viewed Montana. Up until that point, it had just been home. I didn't really see it one way or another. And in the Unabomber coverage, I suddenly saw that there was this whole sort of romantic mythology built up around the West in particular, around this kind of figure, this kind of tortured figure who retreats here.
So that he had been in my mind since childhood and I'd known I wanted to write about him, but I also knew that I didn't want to in any way make him the hero of the story. I didn't want to center on him. It was something that I orbited around for a long time until I came across this little tidbit about this campus security guard who opened the first of his bombs. It kind of opened up a world of how this book could more be about all the lives that he sort of inadvertently touched. He had his targets, but most of the people that he injured or traumatized in various ways were not targets. They were just the people who either happened to open one of the bombs or happened to be his neighbors.
He sounds like he was like a ghost in your life and he feels like a ghost in this book — not as in a spooky ghost. I wouldn't say he's like a horror movie ghost. He's more like a specter who's lingering there. What was he to you as a kid?
He was a shadow. It was an interesting thing, as a little kid I played in the woods in Montana, imagining that there was a monster lurking somewhere and then, when I was 11, I found out that there kind of was, but it was so different from the monster I had imagined. It was sort of this weird, strange, scrawny man whose motives were really mysterious. They didn't really make sense to my 11-year-old self. He seemed sort of banal in a way. He was this former college professor who spent most of his time alone in a shack. It was this kind of complicated shadow that was so different from the one I had imagined as a kid, but one that felt very true to the experience of being alive in the late 20th and early 21st century America.
One of the things that's interesting is the book is also about people trying to escape from the noise of their world. All of these people in here are escaping from something by living in this town, even if they already live there. They're escaping from a marriage or a feeling, or they're escaping from their parents and their lofty academic degrees and trying to find something in the wilderness and trying to save it in their own way trying to save it. And I wonder, do you feel, or are you writing from a place of — as you're out camping and trying to escape from the noise of a book coming out — where the pressures of that world that you wish we could somewhat escape from?
Oh, absolutely.
I think that I often write from a place of observing similar urges in myself that I then judge in others. That, to me, is sort of the gift of writing fiction. I can look at the kinds of people who irk me in one way or another — and the characters in this book represent different kinds of the people who come to Montana, they're looking to save it or be saved by it. It's a very common thing.
If you live in Montana long enough, you see that about every 10 years there's a new wave of people who come here escaping and looking for a different way of life. After they've been here for 10 years, they get really upset about the next wave that shows up. Right now, there's a big wave that showed up in the early aughts, and they really feel like all the pandemic transplants have kind of ruined everything, but the reality is that these waves keep coming with the same sort of dream, and the dream is a combination of escape and redemption. It's escaping from the noise and seeking some kind of purification in the natural world, and I think both of those are kind of tragic urges because when you come looking for those things, you don't really see the place for what it is, and you don't really coexist with it. You're looking for it to give you something or that you can give it something.
So yeah, it was important for me for the book to be an attempt at sort of untangling a lot of the frontier dreams that still motivate people to come here and then motivate the kind of conflicts I've seen over the course of my life over and over again between the so-called-newcomers and the so-called-locals, and, really, none of us have been here that long.
There is a sense of I'm going to this place to save it, or going to this place to escape because nobody can kind of find me there. And I keep thinking of the pandemic. Everybody started leaving cities, or pretended to leave cities, to go to their new homes Vermont. You're not escaping. You can't hide anymore. Also, you can't save a place if you're all going there.
Exactly.
But there is still a frontier dream thing about Montana. I often dream of visiting it and don't.I also have this entire dilemma: I want to see the Glacier National Park before it disappears, but also by me going to Glacier National Park, am I contributing to it disappearing faster?
You get trapped in the paradox of being alive. And I think that's a great point that you made with Vermont. And it's this interesting part of the American psyche that we seem determined to characterize the country as half civilized and half wild, and we make these really arbitrary distinctions. Montana and Vermont are no more inherently wild than Massachusetts and New York. Their wilderness exists everywhere. And also civilization is, as you said, essentially inescapable at this point. I mean, even here, there is WiFi and cell service and everything can catch up with you.
It's kind of a strange construction: our national identity that we, I think, consider ourselves that way. We are both wild and civilized at once. In sort of contrast perhaps to certain European countries of origin that seemed like they had lost the mythic draw of the frontier.
How long did you work on each of the characters?
Well, this was a project that was in the background for a long time as I worked on other things, so there were certain characters that developed over many years, such as Dwayne. Then there were certain characters like Mason who came around much later in the process. I was kind of wanting to balance out the viewpoints in the book and realize that I learned the book that I wrote as I was writing it. If I knew too clearly what it was going in, I'd be bored and would never finish, never be able to run the marathon that is writing a novel.
What I knew going in was that I wanted the book to be more about the bomber’s, or Kaczynski's community than about him. And, as I was writing, I realized that what it was really about was what we've been talking about: untangling this frontier dream that brings these different waves of people to Montana. Through that different characters emerged.
For me, there's always this distinction: certain characters emerged kind of whole cloth. They're just finished. And then there's some characters who I work on for a long time, and they kind of come into view through that process.
So how long were you working on this then? Total?
I mean, probably about 10 years. I wrote two other books during the time, at least. I was poking around at drafts of this knowing that I wanted to tell the story of what felt like a really pivotal moment, not only because of the Unabomber, but the moment being the mid 1970s, which was a very pivotal moment in the environmental movement and the sort of political history of Montana and with the bicentennial for the country as a whole. I knew I wanted to write a story of this community at that time, but it was very much something I was kind of returning to when I would finish other projects because I didn't feel like I understood it well enough for a really long time.
Were there other failed projects before finishing Old King? The writing here is very, I don't want to say mature, but it is. There's a paced and meaningful direction to the book. It's also not super long. It's not long at all, which I often associate with writers as they get older and more experienced, more sure of themselves I should say.
Absolutely. I think the point you make is exactly right. It took me a long time to be able to write this novel. When I had the idea I wasn't ready. I had had one novel I'd worked on for a lot of years that ended up being a complete failure and one of the few things that I was able to mine from it was the character of Hutch, this renegade veterinarian. That book took place mostly in Arizona. There were kind of scraps that emerged from other things, but it was a project that I felt like I needed to learn how to write a novel before I could write this novel. You have to write one novel that teaches you how to write a novel at least. And I think, for me, it was more like I wrote about three novels that taught me how to write a novel.
I don't think a novelists ever learn how to write a novel.
I think there is the terror lessons, and I think the biggest thing that changed for me was an ability to hold a sort of steadiness of vision for a longer period of time. What caused my first novels to fail, and what kind of kept me from fully being able to get into this one, is that I would change my mind so much. I'd start something and I'd be like, okay, I'm going to do it this way, and then I'd get 60 or 70 pages into it and I'd have this really exciting way that I could change it and change direction and, oh, it'll be much better if I do it this way. And I would end with these kind of Frankenstein monsters of manuscripts that they felt like they had six or seven different authors because I would be chasing my most recent whim. And the thing that's gotten easier to me as a novelist is holding fast to sort of a conviction for what I want this book to be and allowing those exciting ideas to be another book that comes somewhere down the line.
That's interesting. I think a lot about how ideas come and how we're so distracted and writing is a lot of distraction, and good writing is you getting out of your own way and being able to put words down while you're not distracted for the 40 minutes at a time or however long you can actually do this for in a sitting and reading is the same way. And I keep thinking about how this book is also about people trying not to be distracted but then are constantly distracted. Ted Kaczynsk is constantly, in the way you write it is, in his own head and distracted by the world around him. Even he's trying to tell you even when his entire motto is the opposite of that, right? I mean, it's human nature to constantly wonder and think that way and second guess yourself and second guess the world around you and contradict yourself.
Exactly.
His legacy is still going on today. Do you think through this book you explore and show how he still relates to people today?
I do. I mean, I think that one of the strange things about writing about this character is everyone I meet and talk to about him, he still holds such a powerful place in our national imagination.
Many people have their own opinions and their own experience of him, and there isn't often sympathy for the ideas, even though the ideas weren't actually his. One of the impossible things about trying to write him was to make any sort of connection to the way he justified his actions. He meticulously dictated the logic in his journals, but it makes not one damn lick of sense. It's just the rambling of a really angry person who wants to hurt people, but has a big brain. So he needs to create a lot of reasons to justify doing what he already wanted to do.
In some way that creates a torture box, a torture box of endless choices and endless distraction that cut us off from the most pleasurable aspect of being human, which is the kind of serene enjoyment of the moment, whether it's in a natural place or a city, it doesn't matter. I think we all have had these moments where we're just in a place and content and not overthinking it. We're in the flow in some way, and yet we've created this society — and I don't blame technology, technology is just an extension of us, it's part of our psyches that we're manifesting into the world — but we've created a society that seems to be based on our most neurotic selves.
I was born at the end of 1984, so smartphones didn't exist until I was out of college. Social media, Facebook came when I was a sophomore in college, so I kind of lived in sort of both worlds and we're just making it harder and harder to do things like writing novels because we're creating a world in which so much incredibly intense and dopamine or depression inducing distraction is so close at hand at every moment.
I was thinking about even Ted today. a lot of the ramblings of a madman that you can't decipher, but the journals aren't that far off from a lot of the homegrown terrorists we have today, who do similar things. They may have different objectives now. Their goals are race related often, but Ted is not just a specter for people growing up, but I often think of him as the first modern terrorists in America. And this journey isn't that different from a lot of these people, except instead of finding themselves in the woods, they go off onto the internet. The woods have been replaced by the internet.
The digital frontier is the new frontier frontier.
Which is a scary thought because it never ends. It's the universe shrunk down and somehow ever expanding into new AI places. And, I wonder, as you were finishing this up, I am sure you weren't thinking about it in that way at first, but because I wouldn't expect you to think about it for over 10 years where we would end up, but at the end, were you like, wow, this I think holds more now than even when I started it?
Absolutely. Very much so.
It's very dicey for me to feel like the kind of philosophers that Ted stole all those ideas from, who created the idea that what we are doing is creating a society in which human beings are slaves to the technology, not vice versa, that our utility in society is based on how well we're able to operate and care for machines at the time. It felt, when I started like, oh, this book could be a warning. And by the time I finished, it felt more like this book could be a meditation on what sort of already happened and on how if this is the world that we're creating in which technology is so deeply intertwined into our lives, how can we steer the ship so that it doesn't become this kind of hellscape that these philosophers imagined in the 50s and 60s?
Is there anything else that you think is important that I should know or add? Something we didn't talk about?
The only other thing that I would say that was really important to me in writing this book, and in my whole body of work, is reconsidering the role that nature plays in fiction. I really tried to make it a character of its own. That was important to me. In my mind, the main character of this book was the setting itself, to give a feeling that all these different kinds of people are coming with their different dreams and their different ways to transform this landscape. In the end, they're all gone, and the landscape is all that's really left.