On Condescension, Canapés, and the Direction of Time

We met at a private dining club off St. James’s that Waugh had insisted upon and Adichie had allowed in the way you allow a diagnostic test — not because you want the result but because the result will be informative. The club had the particular hush of a place that has been quiet for so long it has forgotten what noise is. The carpet absorbed footsteps. The walls absorbed conversation. The portraits absorbed everything and returned nothing, which is the purpose of portraits in English clubs: to remind you that people have been sitting in these chairs for centuries and none of them had to explain why they were here.

Waugh was already seated when I arrived. He occupied his chair the way certain Englishmen of a particular vintage occupy public space — not sitting in it so much as presiding over the absence of anyone who might challenge his right to sit there. He had ordered sherry for the table without consulting anyone, and there were three glasses waiting, amber and still, like specimens.

“I ordered sherry,” he said, which was unnecessary but which served the purpose of establishing that he had ordered sherry, which is different from there being sherry, because the former contains an act of authority and the latter is merely a beverage.

“I see that,” I said, and sat down, and immediately felt that I had sat down wrong, though I could not have said what sitting down right would have looked like.

Adichie arrived seven minutes later. She stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the room — the portraits, the carpet, the sherry, the particular shade of green on the walls that exists only in English institutions and dental offices — and her expression was one I would later come to understand as her working expression. Not disapproval. Inventory.

“This is perfect,” she said, sitting down. “Not for meeting. For the story.”

“You’re welcome,” Waugh said.

“I didn’t say thank you. I said it was perfect. This room. These walls. That painting of a man who owned a shipping company and believed this made him cultured. You brought us to the set. Now we can talk about what happens on it.”

I had come with a question about time. The story was supposed to move backward — that was the constraint, the thing I’d been turning over for days like a coin I couldn’t spend — and I wanted to understand what running a social comedy in reverse would do to the comedy. Whether a joke that lands at a dinner party still lands when you already know the aftermath.

“Of course it does,” Waugh said. He had not touched his sherry. It sat before him with the patience of a prop. “The comedy of manners is always retrospective. Every excruciating dinner I’ve ever written is funny because the reader knows, from the first paragraph, that something will go wrong. The mechanism is not surprise. The mechanism is dread. You see the catastrophe assembling itself and you cannot look away.”

“But that’s forward dread,” I said. “This would be backward. The reader starts with the wreckage and works backward to the cause. They know the dinner was a disaster before they see the first canapé.”

“Then the canapé becomes the disaster. That’s rather good. Every small gesture — the way someone holds a glass, the way someone mispronounces a name — becomes enormous, because the reader knows where it leads. The reader is a god. The characters are not.”

Adichie had been listening with the focused stillness of someone letting an argument develop to its natural weakness before addressing it. “You’re both talking about the reader,” she said. “The reader’s dread, the reader’s knowledge, the reader as god. But the character — the woman at these dinners — what does moving backward do to her?”

“It undoes her,” I said, not sure I knew what I meant.

“Yes. Exactly. If the story moves backward through a series of dinner parties, and each dinner party is earlier than the one before, then the reader watches her lose what she’s learned. The last dinner — which is the first one she attended — she is the newest version of herself. The most hopeful. The most willing to believe that these people mean what they say when they say ‘how wonderful that you’re here.’ And the reader, who has already seen the seventh dinner and the fifth dinner and the third, knows exactly what that ‘wonderful’ means. Knows the weight of it. The reader is carrying the future and the character is not, and the distance between those two positions is the story.”

Waugh set down his glass, which he had finally lifted and then not drunk from. “That’s not comedy. That’s an act of cruelty against your own protagonist.”

“All your novels are acts of cruelty against your own protagonists.”

“My protagonists deserve it. They’re fools.”

“Your protagonists are fools because you made them fools. You gave them money and no sense and set them loose in a world built to punish exactly that combination. This woman is not a fool. She is intelligent and observant and she walks into these dinner parties with her eyes fully open, and what she sees — what she chooses to see — changes over time. Backward, through the dinners, the reader watches her vision narrow. Not because she becomes less intelligent but because she decides, consciously, to stop seeing. That’s not foolishness. That’s survival.”

“Survival,” Waugh said, as though the word had arrived from a country whose passport he did not recognize.

I tried to describe the dinner parties. There would be six or seven of them, I said, hosted by a rotating cast of progressive Londoners — the kind who display their Ottolenghi cookbooks spine-out and who describe their Kenyan holiday as “transformative” without specifying what it transformed or into what. Each dinner would reveal a new layer of polite condescension, and the reverse chronology would mean the reader encounters the condescension from crude to subtle — starting with the dinner where someone finally says the unforgivable thing and working backward to the first dinner where everything was warmth and welcome and the condescension was so fine-grained it was invisible, even to the woman receiving it.

“Especially to the woman receiving it,” Adichie said. “That is the cruelest dinner. The first one. Because at the first dinner she is grateful. She has been invited. Someone has opened their home and cooked elaborate food and seated her next to the interesting people and asked about her work with what appears to be genuine curiosity. And it is genuine. That’s what makes it impossible. The curiosity is real. The welcome is real. The condescension is also real. They coexist. They occupy the same sentence. ‘Tell us about Lagos’ is a real question asked with real interest by a person who has already decided what the answer will confirm.”

“You’re describing every cocktail party I’ve ever written,” Waugh said. “The hostess who believes herself generous because she has invited the vicar. The vicar is there to be the vicar — to be vicarly, to say vicarly things, to provide the company with the experience of having included a vicar. His actual opinions are immaterial. His function is atmospheric.”

“The vicar can leave,” Adichie said. “He walks home to his vicarage and the vicarage is his. He belongs to the same England as the hostess. He is lower in the hierarchy but he is inside the hierarchy. A Nigerian woman in Hampstead is not the vicar. She is the — what is the word — she is the evidence. She is the thing they point to when they describe themselves. ‘We had the most fascinating woman to dinner, she’s from Lagos, she works in — what was it, development? Policy? Something with the UN.’ She exists in their stories about themselves. She is a character in their novel and she doesn’t have the draft.”

I wrote that down. She is a character in their novel and she doesn’t have the draft. That was the sentence I had been reaching for.

“And the blog,” Adichie continued. “There should be a blog. Or something like a blog — a column, a newsletter, whatever the current equivalent is. Something she writes. Not about them. Not at first. At first it’s about London. Observations. The way English people apologize as a form of aggression. The way ‘quite good’ means ‘adequate’ and ‘not bad’ means ‘exceptional’ and ‘interesting’ means ‘I have no intention of engaging with what you just said.’ The column is precise and funny and it circulates and the dinner party people read it and they recognize everyone in it except themselves.”

“Until they do,” Waugh said.

“Until they do.”

We ordered food. Waugh chose for himself with the decisiveness of a man who has been making the same choices for decades and sees no reason to revisit them. Adichie ordered something that was not on the menu and the waiter went to check whether it could be made, which told me something about Adichie and something about the club and something about what happens when those two forces meet. I ordered the soup because I was still thinking about the blog and the dinners and the reverse chronology and I needed something that did not require decisions.

“The problem with backward,” Waugh said, once the food arrived, “is endings. A story told in reverse ends at the beginning, and beginnings are not endings. Beginnings are diffuse. They lack the compression of a final scene. When I write a novel — when a social world collapses, when the bright young things discover they are neither bright nor young — the ending is a contraction. Everything tightens. The party is over. The room is empty. The bills have come. You cannot achieve that contraction by arriving at the first party, because the first party is an expansion. Everything is opening. Everything is possible.”

“That’s exactly why it works,” Adichie said. She had received her off-menu dish — grilled fish with something green — and was eating it with the unselfconscious efficiency of someone who eats to live and has no patience for the performance of eating. “The story ends at the first dinner party. The woman has just arrived in London. She doesn’t know anyone. Someone — a colleague, a friend of a friend — has invited her. She puts on her dress. She checks the address twice. She brings wine because she doesn’t know that in this world you don’t bring wine, you bring obscure small-batch something from a shop whose name is its own postcode. She arrives and the door opens and the hostess smiles and says —”

“‘How wonderful that you’re here,’” I said.

“‘How wonderful that you’re here.’ And it sounds like love. It sounds like the entire country opening its arms. And the reader, who has spent the last six thousand words watching what that welcome actually produced — the questions that were catalogues, the compliments that were classifications, the ‘tell us about Lagos’ that was ‘perform your difference so we can feel good about accommodating it’ — the reader hears ‘how wonderful that you’re here’ and it is the most devastating sentence in the story. Because it’s true. They meant it. They are genuinely glad she’s here. And what they are glad about is the version of her they have already decided she will be.”

Waugh put down his fork. He did this with a small, precise motion that carried more acknowledgment than most standing ovations. “That is a good ending.”

“It’s a good beginning. That’s the point.”

I asked about the food. Not ours — the food in the story. The dinner parties would need menus, I said, and the menus would need to do work.

“Obviously,” Waugh said. “The menu is the social text. What is served at a dinner party communicates everything the host wishes to communicate about themselves and nothing about the guest. When Lady Circumference serves cold mutton, she is telling you she does not care what you think. When the Bollinger Club orders champagne, they are telling you they can. The food is never about the food.”

“In Lagos,” Adichie said, “you cook for the guest. This is not a metaphor. You ask what they eat. You accommodate. You make enough for three more people than are coming because to run out of food is a social catastrophe that reflects not on the food but on you. Hospitality is not a display. It is a transaction. You give food, you receive the right to call yourself a host. In London — in this London, this Hampstead, this Ottolenghi-spine-out London — the food is a statement of values. ‘We’re doing the lamb shoulder from Nigella.’ ‘Everything’s from the farmers’ market.’ ‘We don’t eat — ’ whatever they don’t eat, which changes every eighteen months. The food is a CV. And the woman at the table — my woman, our woman — she eats it. She says it’s lovely. She does not mention that the portion of lamb would feed one person in the room she grew up in and that person would not have been her.”

“The lamb diminishes,” Waugh said.

“What?”

“If the dinners go backward. If we begin at the seventh dinner and end at the first. The food should change. Become more ambitious as we go forward in story-time and backward in chronological time. The first dinner — our last scene — should have the best food. The most generous. The most carefully prepared. Because they were still trying. At the seventh dinner, when it’s all coming apart, someone serves — what — cheese on toast and calls it rarebit. The effort has collapsed because the pretense has collapsed. The food tracks the decay.”

“Or the food tracks the performance,” Adichie said. “At the first dinner, they perform generosity. Abundant, theatrical, look-how-much-we-made generosity. By the seventh, they have stopped performing for her because she has been absorbed. She is no longer the fascinating guest. She is the regular. And the regular gets cheese on toast.”

“Welsh rarebit.”

“Cheese. On toast.”

Waugh wanted to talk about the newspaper. Or whatever served as the newspaper — the group chat, the social media feed, the ambient chatter that manufactures and destroys reputations in the story’s social world. “A Waugh novel without gossip is like a Waugh novel without gin,” he said. “The gossip is the engine. Someone says something about someone to someone else and the information degrades with each transmission until what arrives at the final recipient bears the same relationship to the original statement that a rumor bears to a fact, which is to say: it is more powerful and less true.”

“In this story the blog is the gossip,” I said. “Her column. She writes observations about London and London reads them and London talks about them and what London says about them is not what she wrote.”

“Good. And the reverse chronology means the reader encounters the blog’s reputation before the blog’s content. In the seventh dinner — our opening — everyone has read the column. Everyone has opinions about the column. Everyone is performing the specific dance of people who have been written about by someone who is sitting at their table. And then, as we move backward, the column is less known. Less circulated. Less dangerous. Until, at the first dinner, it doesn’t exist yet. She hasn’t written it. She’s just a woman at a dinner party, eating lamb, being told how wonderful it is that she’s here.”

“And the reader knows,” Adichie said, “that she will go home from that first dinner and she will sit at her laptop and she will write. Not out of anger. Not yet. Out of the particular clarity that comes from being watched by a room full of people who believe they are not watching. She will describe the lamb. She will describe the wine. She will describe the hostess’s smile and the question about Lagos and the way the conversation shifted when she mentioned Boko Haram — not shifted away, shifted toward, with the eager leaning-in of people for whom other people’s tragedies are dinner party currency.”

“Dinner party currency,” Waugh repeated. “Other people’s tragedies traded as social capital over the lamb course. Yes. That is — I would have written that as farce. A hostess collecting catastrophes the way one collects first editions. Displaying them. ‘Did you hear what happened in — where was it — somewhere in Africa. Terrible.’ The somewhere being the point. The vagueness being the courtesy. Precision would require effort and effort would require the admission that one didn’t already know.”

“The vagueness is not courtesy,” Adichie said. “The vagueness is the condescension. When someone says ‘somewhere in Africa,’ they are telling you that the continent is a single room and they cannot be expected to learn the furniture. And the woman — our woman — she hears this and she smiles and she says, ‘Nigeria, actually, the northeast,’ and she provides the precision that the table will not provide for itself, and the table receives this precision as a gift rather than a correction, which is how the table receives everything from her — as a gift. She gives and they receive and the exchange is so smooth, so lubricated by good wine and good manners, that nobody at the table would describe it as extraction.”

Waugh was very still. He had the expression of a man who has encountered an argument he cannot dismiss and is deciding what to do about it. “Extraction,” he said. “You’re describing a dinner party as a mining operation.”

“I’m describing a dinner party as a dinner party. The mining operation is what the hosts would call ‘having a diverse table.’”

The coffee arrived. Waugh’s was black. Adichie’s had milk. Mine was already cold by the time I reached for it because I had been writing and not paying attention, which is a condition I suspect is permanent.

“I keep returning to the smile,” Adichie said. “In the last scene — which is the first dinner — the hostess smiles. And the woman smiles back. Two women smiling at each other across a threshold, and one of them means ‘welcome to my home’ and the other means ‘thank you for having me’ and both of these meanings are true and both of them are insufficient and the insufficiency is the entire story. What the smile contains and what it costs and how those two quantities are never equal.”

“You want the smile to be the last image,” I said.

“I want the smile to be the last image. Two women. A doorway. Wine that is wrong but is brought anyway. Lamb in the oven. The whole evening ahead of them like a road that the reader has already traveled in the other direction and the character has not.”

“It’s sentimental,” Waugh said.

“It’s devastating.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive, and I should know, because I’ve been accused of both in the same review.”

Adichie almost laughed. Not quite. She made a sound that was adjacent to a laugh — a kind of exhaled acknowledgment, the sound you make when someone you have been disagreeing with for an hour says something you didn’t expect to agree with and the agreement catches you off guard.

“The cheese on toast,” she said. “At the seventh dinner. The opening. Someone should say something about the cheese on toast that reveals everything. Not a speech. Not a confession. Just a sentence. ‘We’re doing rarebit, we thought you’d — ’ and then a pause. And in the pause is the entire history of every meal they have served her and what each meal was designed to communicate and how the communication degraded, dinner by dinner, from ‘we honor your presence’ to ‘you’re here again, here’s cheese.’”

“‘We thought you’d appreciate something simple,’” Waugh said. “That’s the sentence. ‘We thought you’d appreciate something simple.’ With ‘simple’ carrying the weight of seven dinners’ worth of assumptions about who she is and what she wants and what her palate can accommodate, which is really a statement about what her world can accommodate, which is really a statement about the size of the room they have built for her inside their idea of her, which is a very small room, much smaller than the room she actually occupies, but they have furnished it with such care, with such conscientious attention to what they imagine she needs, that they

“That they mistake the furniture for generosity,” Adichie said.

Waugh nodded. Once. The nod of a man who has been outwritten and knows it and will not say so.

I looked at my cold coffee. The story was there. I could feel it — not as a plan but as a pressure, the way you feel weather changing before you see clouds. Seven dinners. One woman. A column that starts as observation and becomes accusation. A host class that starts as generous and is revealed, backward through time, as something else. Something that never had a name because the people doing it were always the ones with the authority to name things.

“The lamb,” Adichie said. She had gathered her bag, her coat, her phone. She was leaving with the particular efficiency of a person who has done what she came to do and will not linger to watch it settle. “In the first dinner — the last scene — the lamb should be extraordinary. The best thing anyone has ever cooked for her. She should eat it and mean it when she says it’s wonderful. The food should be genuinely good. The evening should be genuinely warm. Otherwise it’s just