Leave the World Behind

“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.