NONFICTION - May 17, 1992

WAITING FOR RAIN: A Farmer’s Story by Dan Butterworth (Algonquin: $16.95; 226 pp.). Dan Butterworth came to North Carolina to teach but soon found himself spending much of his free time in Archie Clare’s El Camino touring “places that occupy the spaces between the names on the map”--the land on which Clare grew soybeans, corn, tobacco. “Waiting For Rain” consists largely of Clare’s thoughts and observations on the difficulties of modern farming, and though they are occasionally interesting, they are not exceptionally so: The reasons for Butterworth’s obvious fascination with Clare (the name is a pseudonym) never comes through in his text. That’s strangely fitting, however, as “Waiting For Rain” describes Clare’s final year as a farmer: He has since turned to logging, a profession in which he seems to be doing--financially, at least--rather better.