More than half a century ago, trying to find his way out of the chaos of a dysfunctional family that suffers from a dark secret, eighteen-year-old Jimmy Whistler joins the Marines and is sent to Hawaii, not yet a state, where he meets a fifteen-year-old girl, Leilani Kona, who turns out to be the love of his life, his own "Sweet Leilani;" but, due to her age and his sense of honor, their love remains unconsummated. Later, shipped back to the mainland and discharged from the Marine Corps, Jimmy makes a false start in New York City as an actor, falling in with a show business crowd, and, still later, with a band of hippies, all the while trying to perfect his true calling as a writer who is attempting to discover order in a chaos that now appears to be not merely personal but public. How Jimmy and Leilani find each other again in the midst of this private and public chaos is a story both comic and tragic. A Portable Chaos is an historical novel that brings to life the transformation of the United States from the conforming Fifties to the volcanic social eruptions of the "swinging" Sixties-from the private chaos of Jimmy Whistler's childhood to the public chaos of his youth, the former shaping himself, the latter shaping all Americans.