Few hypothetical scenarios are harder to imagine than a conversation between Theodor Adorno and Natalie Portman. Adorno was the highbrow’s highbrow, the sage Thomas Mann turned to for advice while writing Doctor Faustus, the friend and long-time correspondent of Walter Benjamin, the champion of astringent creators like Arnold Schoenberg, the relentless foe of jazz and Hollywood, the mercilessly pessimistic Marxist critic of modernity whose “negative dialectic” has enriched thousands of scholarly studies. Portman is perhaps best known for her turn as Queen Padmé Amidala in the more mediocre of the two Star Wars trilogies.

Yet on the subject of the Holocaust, Adorno and Portman, both of Jewish heritage, might have found some common ground. In a typically dense 1949 essay titled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno — a refugee from Nazi Germany who had lost the world of his youth to the Nazi genocide — bluntly declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Arguably, Portman is not as deep a thinker as Adorno (who died in 1969, twelve years before the actress was born), but the starlet has been impressively educated at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Interviewed by the Daily Mail earlier this year, she complained, “I get like twenty Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre.”

Despite their shared discomfort with Holocaust art, an enormous historical and cultural gulf separates Adorno’s statement from Portman’s. When Adorno was writing, the murder of the European Jews was so fresh that there wasn’t even a proper term to describe it. The catch-all name “the Holocaust” hadn’t yet gained the currency it would receive in the 1970s, “Shoah” was largely confined to Hebrew speakers, and the word “genocide” (coined in 1944) still carried with it the awkwardness of a neologism. In lieu of such terms, commentators most often relied on the infamous and very specific names of the camps: Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and many more. In the Portman era, not only is the Holocaust easier to talk about because it has been named; it has even become a genre, like the romantic comedy, the superhero film, or the road movie. As the saying goes, there’s no business like Shoah business.

Adorno’s brief, barbed, bitter comment — more a cry from the heart than a reasoned statement — is the single most quoted sentence in debates about Holocaust art. And Adorno himself is the inevitable jumping-off point for discussion, because he pinpointed the root dilemma every intelligent artist and critic has experienced: how can you make art about atrocities? Art, no matter how difficult and painful, always involves the aestheticization of reality; every artist is a mortician who prettifies the corpse so the public can look at it without the nausea and dread that death induces. Or, as Adorno said on another occasion, “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it.” In the face of the enormity of what actually happened at Auschwitz, isn’t it better for art to maintain a dignified silence?

If Portman is right and the Holocaust is now a genre, we have to say that Adorno’s worst fear has come true. Not only did poetry persist after Auschwitz, but poetry and the other narrative arts have conspired to make the Holocaust banal. It sometimes seems as if the Holocaust is for modern art what the Crucifixion was to medieval and Renaissance art: a common frame of reference and the quickest way to affect your audience. It would take the entirety of this article to list just the most famous novels, films, comics, and plays about the Holocaust: The Diary of Anne Frank; If Not Now, When?; Sophie’s Choice; See Under: Love; Maus: A Survivor’s Tale; Schindler’s List; Life Is Beautiful; The Pianist; The Shawl; The Reader. Adorno’s strictures are hard to follow. Even Natalie Portman once played Anne Frank on Broadway.

Some of these are brilliant works of art; others are unspeakably exploitive, especially that mawkish monstrosity Life Is Beautiful. But whatever quality they possess, they all must answer to Adorno’s piercing question: after what actually happened, how can you presume to offer up a distillation of reality that is also, inevitably, a distortion of reality?

I must confess that when I heard that Yann Martel’s new novel is about the Holocaust my heart, already Grinchily small, shrank just a little bit more. “Does the world really need another Holocaust novel? ” I wondered. “Especially one written by a very goyish Canadian? ” Upon reading the book, I realized that my misgivings were somewhat misplaced. Whatever other faults Martel has, he’s not a sensation-monger or a cheap writer. His book is at worst a noble failure, a sincere attempt to write about a large and terrible subject in a fresh way, so the pain of the past doesn’t recede into history. Interestingly, he takes up the Adorno question and puts it in the foreground. Beatrice and Virgil is not so much about the Holocaust directly as it is about the problem of representing the Holocaust in art. It’s a meta–Holocaust novel, and as such more valuable for the reflections it provokes than for any literary merit it may posses.

As in Martel’s previous book, the best-selling Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil opens with a writer at a literary crossroads. Henry’s previous novel was an international bestseller that featured “wild animals.” As a follow-up, he writes an avant-garde Holocaust story fused with an essay on the same subject to form a flip book. Henry’s experimentalism is based on the argument that literature about the Shoah has been tyrannized by the dominance of one mode: “histor-ical realism.” Henry’s editors aren’t happy with what they see as his notion that “we’re supposed to throw our whole imagination at the Holocaust [and write] Holocaust westerns, Holocaust science fictions, Holocaust Jamaican bobsled team comedies.”

Rejected and dejected, Henry forswears the literary life and tries to sink back into anonymity by moving with his wife, Sarah, to an unnamed foreign city. There he encounters a fan and namesake, Henry the taxidermist, who wants novelist Henry’s help with an experimental play about two talking animals, Virgil the monkey and Beatrice the donkey. The erstwhile writer forms an uneasy collaboration with the taxidermist, and both grapple with the issue that began the book, “representations of the Holocaust.” Much of the novel consists of excerpts from the embryonic play the two Henrys work on. The two animals are paralleled by stuffed specimens in the taxidermist’s workshop, and by a dog and a cat in the writer’s home; doppelgangers abound.