“The people who owned this house were rich enough to be thoughtful.” 

Class consciousness is one of the core tensions of the book, and Amanda’s noticing of how well-appointed and thoughtful everything is in the house underscores this coming conflict, especially as it becomes entangled with notions of race and Amanda’s own sense of liberal self-importance. Amanda wants access to this kind of life, but does not feel entirely comfortable in it.

“Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.” 

This quote is a wry nod to America’s history of racist violence and a marker of Clay’s glib attitude toward the real impact of his smoking; he is willing to hint at subjugation and violence as a core part of American identity, but only in a way that undercuts it and makes him feel like he is thinking of it from a place of ironic distance.

“Amanda had a novel she could barely follow, with a tiresome central metaphor involving birds.” 

Rumaan Alam takes a moment here to undercut his own book, which features a central metaphor involving birds. This can be read as either a meta moment of self-consciousness or an admission that literature will have to carve out a new kind of meaning-making in the face of apocalyptic living.