"Tony Tanner said that it inaugurated a new period in American fiction, foreshadowing and sometimes directly influencing the work of later ambitious novelists such as Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace.Franzen compared the novel to a "huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures, executed on wood panels by Brueghel or Bosch."