Contemporary literature mirrors a pervasive cultural sense of helplessness

Evidence

The fact of the matter is that a sense of diminishing control, loss of individual autonomy and generalized helplessness has never been so instantaneously recognizable in our literature ç the flattest possible characters in the flattest possible landscapes rendered in the flattest possible diction. The presumption seems to be that American is a vast fibrous desert in which a few laconic weeds nevertheless manage to sprout in the cracks. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 389

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is this claim (that lit is flatter now than ever before) empirically testable, or a periodizing assertion in need of evidence?