Mr. Clean Lights Out for the Territory : EXIT THE RAINMAKER <i> by Jonathan Coleman; (Atheneum: $18.95; 402 pp.) </i>

In late May, 1982, Jay Carsey, good-looking, upwardly mobile WASP, charismatic president of Charles County Community College, highly paid government consultant and pillar of Southern Maryland society, took off for God-knows-where, leaving behind a series of enigmatic messages to his gorgeous wife, admiring colleagues and loyal friends. Though the messages told where the keys and the bank accounts were and bore witness that Carsey, ever Mr. Clean, was not dropping out of sight on account of any financial monkey business, there were no clear indications of why Carsey was leaving everyone in the lurch like this.

Graduation was only days away. The college, after the heady expansions of the Kennedy-Johnson years, was beginning to experience the contractions of the Reagan era. And though Carsey took with him less than $30,000 and left behind a fairly substantial estate, he provided his abandoned unemployed wife with no clear title and the dreary prospect of pursuing her property through the courts. Once the police had eliminated the possibilities of suicide and foul play, people were left with no coherent explanation. After all, Jay Carsey--”Uncle Jay” to (it seemed) all of Southern Maryland--was the one person you could always count on. But Carsey’s farewell messages were pellucid on a couple of points: He had planned this stunt carefully and he had no intention of returning or of being found--ever.

To John Sine, dean of the college and his obvious successor, Carsey left a color postcard of Ronald and Nancy Reagan with an inscription that referred to the title role Crasey had played in a production that Sine had directed when the two first met years earlier: “Exit the Rainmaker. Good luck.”

Jonathan Coleman, who first reported this story for CBS News, is no ordinary investigator. With the tenacity of a scientist, the patience of a novelist, and the instincts of a hunter, he pursues Jay Carsey’s motivation--through the events of his life and the remembrances of his family, friends, and acquaintances. (The man had virtually no enemies.) The gradual accretion of detail gives you the feeling of watching the restoration of a ruined mosaic. Seemingly random tesserae assume their place in the pattern; a detailed portrait begins to emerge from the pieces.

About halfway through the book, Coleman actually catches up with Carsey in person, only to find that the man himself is no less enigmatic than the messages he left behind. Nonetheless, as this antic narrative draws to its conclusion, you feel satisfied that Coleman has “got” Carsey--at least as well as one man can ever get another--that the mystery of Carsey’s flight has been dispelled, and that you are left only to puzzle about whether Carsey did the right or the wrong thing in throwing over his life and loves the way he did. Coleman himself refuses to help the reader with this judgement, retaining to the last the stance of the clinical observer and never permitting himself the dubious joys of the moralist.

How many Jay Carseys are there in America? Very few--at least among the middle class--would act on their fantasies as he did. But how many are there who have such fantasies? Almost everyone, Coleman discovers in his interviews. Some fantasists confess their admiration of Carsey openly; others, fearing that the thinnest line separates their grueling treadmills of responsibility from Carsey’s footloose dereliction, rail against him. But in their railing, Coleman rightly hears the telltale noises of excessive protestation.

Coleman gets something wrong, I think, and that is his assumption of the universality of Carsey’s story: “If the life (Carsey) had been living was irrevocably American, his decision to light out was far more universal.” But “lighting out” is a typically American phenomenon--is, in truth, part and parcel of the national literary myth that Leslie Fiedler limned so arrestingly in “Love and Death in the American Novel” many moons ago. Even the phrase Coleman uses is a (it would seem, unconscious) borrowing from Huck Finn, who articulated his intention to “light out for the territory” before Aunt Sally could “sivilize” him.

Fiedler also pointed out that the white male’s fantasy of flight (preferably in the company of a darker-skinned, more elemental male) usually is prompted by a castrating female who represents civilization at its most repressive. Who was Jay Carsey’s Aunt Sally? The answer is not far to find. He had two: his mother and his wife. It was his mother who programmed him to be the best, to shine at everything. (His father, incidentally, served as the pattern of male inwardness and control.) It was his wife who saw to it that all Jay’s screws were screwed as tight as could be--in service to her needs and whims and an acquisitiveness as cosmic as Imelda Marcos’. Both these women were the objects of Carsey’s hidden rage, a rage so buried it could only be expressed in flight. For Carsey’s flight resulted in his mother’s heart attack and death and years of anguish for his (at last, ex-) wife, Nancy.

But though this story may not have quite the universal ring that Coleman ascribes to it (I think it would be incomprehensible in most of the Southern Hemisphere and off-putting even in parts of Europe), it is a fascinating symbolic statement of the American psyche. In a time when the psychological models of Freud, Jung, Lacan et al have been criticized as too culturally specific to have universal relevance, “Exit the Rainmaker” points to the need for diverse, culturally specific models of the psyche that are not Viennese or Swiss or Parisian. It points to a crying need for Americans to reexamine the WASP model of psychological health: tough, dry humor, thank you; win at tennis; win at business; win at squash; leave the bar clear-eyed, though mind is totally drowned by very dry martinis; and no emotion, please.

Most important, “Exit the Rainmaker” points to what may be America’s most pressing need of all: to reunite its emotional life and its spiritual life in a new, integrated whole. The phenomenal sales, during the last decade, of one attempt to create such an integration, Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” give some indication of how pressing the need is. If the Puritan model, from which the WASP caricature has sprung, won’t do any longer, what will? (In this endeavor of integration the majority culture might at last appropriate from the ethnic minorities gifts of more lasting value than the pizza, bagels, and feta cheese it already has received so avidly.)

Given the book’s importance in explaining us to ourselves, it is a shame it has not been better edited. Some judicious pruning would have eliminated needless padding and fuzzy circumlocutions. Coleman, who usually sounds like a minor-league E.B. White, can occasionally write like a meandering freshman. This book, like Coleman’s first one, the equally fascinating “At Mother’s Request,” was accepted at Atheneum by Tom Stewart, one of the publishing industry’s last gentlemen and a great editor. By the time the “Rainmaker” manuscript was delivered, Stewart was gone, another casualty in the sad war of quality vs. greed that has made Publisher’s Row an annex of Movieland. Too bad Atheneum didn’t care about the book enough to get down to the job of editing it.