A Portable Chaos opens with a stream-of-conscious-ness flash-back 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 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,...