Without dumping on anybody’s work in particular –
Writing about mass trauma is tricky. There is a temptation to write paradigmatic — to essentialize the conflict into your characters so as to say you’ve done it justice — but then you’re probably in a derivative story, paying dues to the tragedy without saying anything new. I’d rather find novel characters and conflicts within the mass, even if they’re not representative — giving new faces and stakes to the subject, which begin to suggest to the reader how many staggering different experiences in absentia must be buried within that mass tragedy. Think of the guy in The Pianist – what do we remember about that movie? It’s not the Holocaust. It’s watching him play air piano in the middle of the Holocaust. It’s watching how much he aches to press his fingers down onto the real keys. It broadens what that tragedy means for us.
So use mass tragedy, but give us something bizarre and wondrous and new in the middle of it. Leave us with a sense of wonder at all the other infinite possible worlds that must be balled up inside of it.