It is a story that could be anyone's. Jay Carsey, 47 years old, a college president, a man so well-liked that friends referred to him as Uncle Jay, and so prominent in southern Maryland that everyone knew him - or thought they did.
When Carsey disappeared on May 19, 1982, walking away from his wife, work and friends, leaving behind some letters and little else, he committed an act that challenges our notion of what is courageous and what is cowardly, of what is rational and what is not.- From the flyleaf of "Exit the Rainmaker"
This is a story that could be anyone's, which is both the strength and the failing of "Exit the Rainmaker."
All of us know someone who threw over a "perfect" life. Thus we are willing to read about what makes Jay Carsey tick. But Jay Carsey is not a celebrity, and we are only fascinated by his motivations, not by the daily doings of his life.
Jonathan Coleman goes into great detail about Carsey's life. It's a format that worked well for him when he wrote, "At Mother's Request." For that earlier book, Coleman interviewed everyone who knew anything about Frances Schreuder and her relationship with her son, and then, quote by quote, digging a little deeper with each chapter, he showed us how a murderer is made.
However, Jay Carsey didn't commit a bizarre crime. All he did, this community college president, was walk away from his wife and his job. And Coleman doesn't have to dig very deep before we learn that Carsey left because his life was materialistic and meaningless.
But for a full 200 pages, Coleman describes just how meaningless Jay Carsey's life was. "After all," he quotes Carsey as saying, "once you hit six good drives off the tee, do you really need to hit six dozen more?"
Exactly. Six descriptions of Jay and Nancy's house, of their trips, her furs and his alcoholism would have been enough. Yet, while you realize it could have been more tightly written, you keep going with this book.
"Exit the Rainmaker" contains enough interesting insights and little mysteries (such as what happened to the woman with whom he had an affair?) to hold your interest. And best of all, "Exit the Rainmaker" has heaps of irony.
For example, Carsey was working as a bartender in El Paso when People magazine ran a piece about him. He panicked and prepared to run. But no one noticed. His friends in El Paso, Carsey learned, didn't read "People."
Carsey was only to escape his past for a year. Reporters from national television (including Coleman, who was with CBS at the time) decided that of the thousands of disappearances of 1982, Jay Carsey's was worth a story. Eventually, one of Carsey's patrons recognized his bartender's face on TV.
But, it seems, Carsey didn't really want to sever his ties for much longer anyway.
Though no one forced him to do it, he began to contact his old friends. He took a job at a community college. Then he filed for divorce, asking for half of everything he walked away from.
In the last part of the book, when he is exploring Carsey's second life, all Coleman's interviews and quotes pay off. He may spend too much time establishing what a shallow life Nancy and Jay had together, but Coleman leaves the reader longing for more insight about what it was Jay Carsey was seeking.
If Carsey is Everyman, as Coleman says he is, then the questions that the reader has, upon closing this book, must certainly be central to understanding the human condition. One question is this: "Why, after being so happy to leave them, was Carsey so happy to get his golf clubs back?"