A Portable Chaos

A Portable Chaos opens with a stream-of-conscious-ness flash-back to a childhood incidents that resemble James Joyces 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 un-tapped 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 content-ment and reconciliation with all those childhood demons.