by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 16, 2008   Last Updated: February 17, 2008

"Exit the Rainmaker" tells a remarkable true story from 1982. A woman in Maryland, married for 14 years, comes home to discover that her husband has vanished. There's no explanation, even in the letters he eventually sends to his former business colleagues. Instead, the president of a community college had included three cryptic words.

"Exit the Rainmaker."

Underneath their perfect marriage was a second story. The wife appears in People magazine, telling the story of her husband's unexplained disappearance, but the book lets the mystery linger until revealing the husband's side of the story. The people who thought they knew 47-year-old Jay Carsey didn't realize that underneath the charm lay a deep insecurity from problems in his childhood. It raises an additional question - will he find happiness in his new life?

He moves to a small town in Texas, carrying a briefcase in the trunk of his car that he's filled with enough money to survive. He finds a sympathetic woman who starts a new relationship with him, and with his professional experience, he eventually found more work in academia. One day his briefcase filled with money is stolen. But he clings to his dream of a new life, even though his past is revealed after someone recognizes him from the article in People magazine. Three years later, Mrs. Carsey ultimately granted him a divorce.

The book has two big weaknesses. Author Jonathan Coleman raises an interesting question - do other successful men have the same dream of flight? But he fills this part of the book with rhetorical speculation, rather than any hard statistics on the number of men who simply abandon their marriages. (Even Carsey had an illegitimate child before marrying his wife in 1968.) Carsey ultimately argues that he's happier in his new life. But the book takes a tone that's even-handed and baffled, neither condemning or applauding, which unfortunately makes it less satisfying.

But the other problem with the book is simply its publication date. Though it was originally written in 1990, three years later Carsey left his second wife, the woman he'd married in El Paso. ("I don't think he knows what he wants," his first wife told a reporter for the Washington Post. "I think he needs professional help.") The book doesn't deliver all the pieces of the Carsey story. In 2000, at the age of 65, Jay Carsey died in Jacksonville, Florida. A New York Times obituary said he "led three different lives," and received the news of his death from his new "companion," Connie Silverton. It's only through the Times' obituary that readers learn how the story ended.

"Dr. Carsey went to Jacksonville, made it his home, and taught at some colleges in Florida in the 1990's. He lived quietly, often watching football games."

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