The irony of a successful wreck
Burn-out is the ironic consequence of long-term success at the chronic expense of one's own mental health. Without paying constant, disciplined attention to mental health and balance, it becomes easy to panic one's way into success, but as Daniel shows, this only leads to fatigue and frustration. Better, he thinks, to clear the air by working through these things with his family. Meanwhile, they want him to go to Yale. When will success be enough?
The irony of Tasha's brother
Guess who didn't do anything wrong but still gets punished? Tasha's family. It is only the brother who gets loud-mouthed with the cops, and when he tells the officer that he is an illegal immigrant, they take the whole family back to deportation. This ironic group punishment for a single person's indiscretion is itself symbolic, showing the way people sometimes feel about immigration, judging the whole for a very small minority.
The irony of a cheating lawyer
This irony is well-explored, but still deeply ironic. Because Jeremy Fitzgerald's expertise is concerned with American law (specifically immigration law), he represents the immigration process in the novel. That's literally what he signifies to Tasha and Daniel. So, his indiscretion, trying to date his paralegal regardless of the damage it would do for her family—that low opinion of family and community does not bode well for his practice of law.
The irony of individualism
All these stories add up to this grand irony, that although humans have lived in integrated communities since the dawn of man—and even before that in our ancestry, because the primates lived in herds. So individualism is more than ironic—it is absurd. To pretend that life can be done by checking boxes that amount to personal "success" while feeling alone and ostracized, it just doesn't work. Daniel knows that after a while, when he looks back on his life and realizes, yes he succeeded in his goals, but he is not happy with his life because he feels ostracized by his family's expectations.
