Unendlicher Spaß
Early reviews contributed to "Infinite Jest"'s hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event. In the "Review of Contemporary Fiction", Steven Moore called the book "a profound study of the postmodern condition." In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, "Infinite Jest" "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." In a 2008 retrospective by "The New York Times", it was described as "a masterpiece that's also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric."