NONFICTION - Dec. 24, 1995

ALL THE POWERFUL INVISIBLE THINGS: A Sportswoman’s Notebook by Gretchen Legler. (Seal: $20.95; 193 pp.) After several decades of hunting and fishing, first with her father, then with her husband, Gretchen Legler writes: “I’m afraid of the killing. . . . I’m afraid that I wouldn’t know how to live and not murder. . . . The line is so thin,” she says, referring to thoughtless hunters, “I’m afraid there is no difference between me and them.” This, as you can see, is no ruddy-cheeked robust tale-telling of life in the great outdoors. It’s a fragile, honest accounting of a woman’s efforts to reconcile an experience, a culture, a way of living that has traditionally been male with her own experience, using the same guns, the same fishing poles, killing some of the same animals in some of the same places, but as a woman. Of course, there’s more. There is a sister who kills herself, the day-to-day cruelty of her father toward her mother when she was growing up and Legler’s difficult withdrawal from the world of relationships with men, from her marriage, to enter a new world of relationships with women. “I am 30 years old now,” she writes, “and I feel alone. I am not a man. Knowing this is like an earthquake. Just now all the lies are starting to unfold.” We watch them unfold, we watch the author retrieve the light heart buried under memories and lies.