Gus Traynor is the editor and publisher of the Fairbanks Mercury, a small independent newspaper. With the help of his eclectic staff – Noreen, his unlucky-in-love sister, Felix, an Irish immigrant, and Gayle, a journalism student at the University - he produces a weekly that reflects his independent spirit and his desire to tell the truth. In the process, he touches on issues important to Fairbanks and Alaska in general: progress and development vs. land preservation, the deterioration of Native culture, and the boom-bust cycle of an economy driven by oil. In Correcting the Landscape, Marjorie Kowalski Cole treats us to a glimpse of life in Fairbanks as lived by a regular guy trying to make a living.

Perhaps the strength of this book is its look at “real Alaska.” The details are rich and historically accurate for the Fairbanks of the late 1980’s. This is not the Fairbanks seen by tourists, who “ride the big sternwheeler down the Chena River, or go into the hills to admire old gold dredges and pan salted sluice boxes for souvenir flakes of gold, or stroll the part of downtown that’s popping like a new biceps with parks and statues.” Rather this is “that part of town avoided by tour buses.” There is a tension here, between the Alaska people imagine and Alaska as it is, a tension that is often reflected in issues of development versus land preservation. As Gus puts it: “Those tour buses have resulted in a lot of new pavement in Alaska, and a lot of official dissembling to create the illusion of Alaska.” Cole manages to make some corrections to this official illusion of Alaska in this novel.

Correcting the Landscape is not a riveting book. Like her protagonist, Gus, says of newspaper stories: “You have to start somewhere, and you have to have a coherence in your story, and real life is not like that.” Correcting the Landscape is more like real life than a newspaper story. It is a story made up of mundane details that follow one another, rather than being an intense, plot-driven narrative. If you are looking for an Alaskan adventure story, this is not the book to read. But if you are looking for a thoughtful look at regular life in an Alaska city, with all the ordinary and commonplace details that happen in real life, this may be the book for you. Despite the state’s vast wilderness landscape and opportunities for adventure, in many ways, life in Alaska is much like it is everywhere else. This book may help correct the Alaskan landscape in the popular imagination.

Before publishing Correcting the Landscape, Marjorie Kowalski Cole contributed poems, stories, and essays to a wide range of periodicals and journals. She holds a bachelor of arts in English and a MA in library sciences. She is a long time Fairbanks resident. Correcting the Landscape won the 2004 Bellwether Prize for Fiction. It is her first novel.