Review: The Janitor by Jan Irving

TITLE: The Janitor
AUTHOR: Jan Irving
ISBN: 9781596329386
PUBLISHER: Loose Id
LENGTH: Novel, 171 pages
GENRE: Gay Contemporary BDSM Romance

BOOK BLURB:
Dane Connelly is a gay janitor and boxer with a soft heart and a simple outlook – he wants to meet the right man, someone who will look past his macho sport and put him in the place of a submissive. He wants to fall in love and belong to his partner.

On the surface, Noel Atherton, an intellectual, shy, and sexually repressed university graduate student with a crippled leg, could not be the dominant lover that Dane longs for. But after their first meeting, when Dane disables the fire alarm in the library and lights a cigarette, Noel is drawn from his shell. Soon, Noel needs to touch Dane, exploring his sexuality for the first time. And both learn that looks can be deceiving.

However, Noel’s controlling father is appalled by the relationship and quietly arranges to get Dane out of the way and punish him for daring to love a man so far above his station.

REVIEW:
When I first began reading this, I found Dane’s voice to be so endearing that my hopes were rather high that this would be a great read, but it just kept disappointing me.

Dane’s looking for the right man who will look past his brawn and “take care of him”. He wants love and a real relationship, not just a series of anonymous romps in back alleys. He thinks he’s found his perfect man in Noel. People often take advantage of Dane because they see a big guy who’s a little slow and they figure that that’s all there is to him. But Dane is a very sweet character, the kind you cheer on and hope gets his happy ending. He reminds me of a cross between Rocky Balboa (Rocky) and Ray Kowalski (Due South). He’s got Rocky’s simplicity and heart, and Ray’s speech patterns and energy.

Despite how endearing I found him, Dane’s characterization is inconsistent. His parts of the story are told from his first-person viewpoint. We get a rich narrative of events from him, but his speech and the words he uses are sometimes at odds. For example, he uses a lot of slang, contractions, and eye dialect, yet he uses the proper form of “you are”. It lends a slight foreignness to his speech that I found distracting. There were also times when Dane seemed much too child-like for my own reading comfort. There were a few key scenes where it was actually rather off-putting, especially given his sexual relationship with Noel.

Noel is a physically challenged, sexually repressed, rich-boy academic living under his father’s thumb. He and Dane enjoy talks on a number of subjects, and I think Noel is drawn to Dane through his charming, yet artless, chatter. Through the course of the book, Noel has a lot to deal with – his dominating father, his growing relationship with Dane, his physical limitations – but we don’t get as much insight into his actions and motivations as we do with Dane. Where Dane’s narrative is open, Noel’s is more ambiguous. This did further the plot of the story, but it still left me feeling that the narrative as a whole was uneven.

With Noel’s reticent personality, I was expecting a slow, healthy build-up to a sexual relationship with Dane. Noel needed time, in my opinion, to gain confidence in himself and get over many of the issues that were holding him back. What I got was a too-sudden sex scene in a college reading library. It seemed too soon in the story for Noel to be ordering Dane to get naked and lie back on a desk. His sudden confidence went against everything I knew about the character at that point in the story. Just a few pages earlier, Noel had admitted that he hadn’t even allowed himself to think in a sexual way in years. It didn’t ring true of his personality or his past that he would suddenly go from being a shy, reserved, and somewhat submissive man to a confidant, sexual man who enjoys dominating his partner.

Throughout the story, there are the usual little ups and downs and small misunderstandings between Dane and Noel. While a few of them were realistic given their personalities, the rest didn’t really work for me. I didn’t like that when Noel suddenly stops coming around, Dane believes that Noel only wants him for sex because no one else has ever wanted him for anything else. Dane seems too accepting and matter-of-fact about his past and too loyal to Noel to assume this after one missed visit. I could be wrong, but I thought Dane would be the type of person to go to Noel and ask him what was going on rather than assuming the worst with little evidence.

The subplot of Noel’s father was interesting in that I found his father to be a devious, nasty, old bastard. I enjoyed wondering what awful thing he would attempt next in order to get his son away from Dane. He was a completely over-the-top character and I admit I liked that about him. I suppose if the rest of the story had been better written, I would have seen him as quite ridiculous, but since it wasn’t, I just decided to take him as we was with few expectations.

I thought that Dane being artistic was a lovely touch given his rough job as a boxer, but I didn’t feel he was educated enough, nor mentally capable enough, to get into the prestigious art college he was in toward the end of the story. I was left with the feeling that he was only there because of the strings Noel and his money must have pulled for him. I also got the impression that he was going along with the college idea because it was what Noel wanted. Art seemed to be something Dane loved, but not something he needed an art degree in in order to be happy doing. I certainly understand what might have motivated the author to do this – I did want Dane to be happy in a safer line of work doing what he loved doing – but I felt it was a disservice to the character for it to be done in the way it was.

As a side note, the whole “call me Daddy” thing really squicked me, especially when I take into account Noel’s issues with his father and Dane’s, in my opinion, questionable mental age.

There were positive aspects to the book, but I just couldn’t get past the many disappointments it had for me in order to enjoy them more.

Rating: