The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God
By John R. Powers

448 Pages • $12.95

The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God
By John R. Powers

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God is a pitch-perfect re-creation of the world of young Catholic men from the South Side of Chicago circa 1970. John R. Powers’s hero (or, more accurately, antihero) is Tim Conroy, an angst-ridden, draft-dodging college student who surveys his domain with the bewildered cynicism of an Irish Catholic Holden Caulfield. Tim is representative of a generation that was just emerging from a blue-collar ethnic culture of clear expectations and modest ambitions into a very different world. The old rules were gone. Something new was being born. And Tim and his cohorts didn’t like it.

Three traumatic events shaped Tim Conroy’s generation. John F. Kennedy, the beloved Irish Catholic president, was killed. Vatican Council II changed the unchangeable Catholic Church. America got involved in a bloody and morally objectionable war in Vietnam, and the government began drafting thousands of young men like Tim to fight it. A generation of young people came of age to find the old, steady institutions engulfed in turmoil.

Tim Conroy looks out on this world with an extremely jaundiced eye. He heaps scorn on educators, businessmen, and politicians. He commutes to college in downtown Chicago, fitfully studying, changing majors, and preparing for . . . what? He and his compatriots look with loathing on the careers that beckon them. Tim has the good fortune to meet a terrific girl, the only light in his gloomy life, but his anger and cynicism drive her away. He’s an unhappy man in an unhappy time, resisting others’ expectations of him while trying to find some new basis for hope and effort.

The tone of The Unoriginal Sinner is much darker than that of John Powers’s other two coming-of-age novels set in 1950s and ’60s South Side Chicago, The Last Catholic in America and Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (also published in the Loyola Classics series). Tim Conroy is not Eddie Ryan, the hero of the other two books, but it’s possible to read Powers’s three Chicago novels as a trilogy of sorts. They depict a clever and sunny boy growing into a wary and sardonic man as the traditional values of church, family, and neighborhood gradually crumble. Clearly, in Powers’s mind, the sad changes in the boy are related to the deterioration of his culture.

Tim Conroy retains a taste for asking the Big Questions, and an auto mechanic named Caepan is Tim’s mediator in his dialogue with God. From boyhood on, Tim makes a ritual of dropping off his questions at Caepan’s shop and stopping by later for the answers. In one letter, Tim complains about dour priests and nuns. God writes him this reply:

Conroy: . . .

First of all, just because someone works for me, you shouldn’t believe everything they say. I’ve never been that fussy about who I hire.

Now contrary to what some of these people might have said, I find being God a lot of fun. I’m very rich, you know. I own everything. I enjoy being alive and so I always have been.

I like to create things: mountains, forests, oceans, people.

People are the toughest things of all to create. They’re so minute and delicate. Just the wrong touch of this or that and you can ruin one of them.

Having people around makes me feel good. Mountains, forests, oceans, and animals don’t tell me how important I am. Well, they do, but not in as nice a way as people. Let’s face it, you can’t have a good time at a party when you’re the only one there. I need you.

Signed: God

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About the Author (click here to learn more about this author)

John R. Powers was born in 1945 on the South Side of Chicago. He earned a BA in sociology from Loyola University Chicago and an MA and a PhD in communications from Northwestern University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Studs Terkel, a Chicago radio personality and writer known for his oral histories (Hard Times, The Good War). Powers was a professor of speech and performing arts at Northeastern Illinois University for six years. He also created and hosted a number of specials for Chicago public television during this time.

Powers’s writing career began at the age of sixteen, when the Chicago Tribune published a column he penned. Years later, he started writing about growing up Catholic during the 1950s and 1960s, because, he says, no one else had.

“You write what you know about,” he says. “No one had ever written a book about the culture of growing up Catholic. I wanted to write a humorous social portrait of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century.”

Powers’s stories first appeared in the form of articles written for Chicago magazine. The novels followed in quick succession: The Last Catholic in America (1973), Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1975), and The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God (1977). He has written one other novel, The Junk-Drawer Corner-Store Front-Porch Blues (1992), as well as Odditude: Finding the Passion for Who You Are and What You Do (2007).

Powers’s “fictionalized memoirs” of growing up Catholic have found life beyond the printed page. In 1979, a musical production of Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? opened in Chicago and ran there for three years. Powers produced the Chicago show full-time, as well as other productions of the play in other major cities. Powers has also produced and starred in a one-man show called Life’s Not Fair . . . So What?

John Powers and his wife, JaNelle, have two daughters, Jacey and Joy. He lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and is a motivational speaker. He speaks to about ninety companies, professional organizations, and community groups a year.

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Links for John R. Powers

John Powers’s Web site

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