A Portable Chaos opens with a stream-of-conscious­ness flash­back to a childhood incidents that resemble James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, " which gains significance as the novel unfolds. The main character, Jimmy Whistler, is a decent guy overflowing with un­tapped potential, who walks away from opportunities and the wrong sort of success and follows his bliss as a poet. Whistler and his friend Marsayas, a Zoroastrian hippie, belong to the generation of men who were possible or actual cannon fodder during the U.S.A. war in Vietnam, the generation that witnessed the end of the dominant myth of American difference, or American innocence. After a pretty squalid time living "la vie Boheme" (vividly written, conjuring up the ghosts of 1960s' past), Whistler emerges from the slough and finds validation, the girl, fame, fortune, content­ment, and reconciliation with all those childhood demons.