Stephen Moss is writing about the frosty critical reception that's been accorded to Yann Martel's new book Beatrice and Virgil. I haven't read the book so can't comment on whether it deserved the reception it got. But two assumptions reported by Moss as informing the judgements of reviewers merit comment. The first is this: 'The general view is that pretty well all fictional treatments of the Holocaust are doomed...' The second: 'that many critics recoil from the very idea of a Holocaust novel written by an author who is [not] Jewish'.
These opinions both strike me as ignorant. I think that books by Philippe Claudel, Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, Martin Amis, Louis Begley, Art Spiegelman, Jiri Weil and Ida Fink (from what could have been a longer list) suffice to dispose of the view that 'pretty well all' fictional treatments of the Holocaust are doomed, notwithstanding the 'pretty well'. Fiction on the Holocaust is, like most other fiction, mixed in character, some of it lousy, some of it indifferent, and some of it exceptionally good - though the subject has obvious pitfalls. There are writers in the above list who are not Jewish. As Martel rightly tells Stephen Moss, there's no reason why non-Jewish writers shouldn't write about it.