It’s not you, it’s your books

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed—or misguided—literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favourite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers.

Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way—as a sort of first pass—of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. To Fels (who happens to be married to literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about…their level of intellectual curiosity, their style,” Fels said.

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”

Let’s face it—this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste.) “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s.

James Collins, whose new novel, Beginner’s Greek, is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading The Magic Mountain on a plane, recalled that after college he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her bedside table. “There were occasions when I wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).”

Naming a favourite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore—or a phony. But how much of all this agonising is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading Candy by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.”

For most people, love conquers literary taste. Says Ben Karlin, editor of Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me: “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker—more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, so we’re not dating.’”
-RACHEL DONADIO (NYT)