There was a self-consciously modish launch party at the Tenth Street Lounge in the East Village followed by a book tour weaving across the United States. By the end of the following month, Infinite Jest had already been through six printings. The wildly hubristic claims on postcards sent by the publishers Little, Brown before the novel's release had not been lies; Wallace truly had written a book that changed American fiction.

So, on its 20th birthday, how does Infinite Jest hold up? Does it have relevance to a generation to whom the early Nineties must seem impossibly remote?

Wallace wrote his novel when mobile phones were a rarity and when the internet – at least in the way we use it now - was in its infancy. It was a novel written amid the economic abundance of the Clinton years, with the Cold War won and nothing to do but watch MTV.