The novel form carries religious shape and imagery even within secular fiction

Evidence

If this were all there were to say, then we could, by extension, suggest that Leila Aboulela is wasting her time writing novels. Her attempts to articulate an experience unrecognizable in the available terms of secular literary critique would be doomed to failure from the start. Yet this need not be the case. Although we should still be wary of the pitfalls of reading practices that may foreclose certain understandings of experience, we can nonetheless return to questions of form, both to note those obstacles to conveying faith and to register the immanent means by which the novel as a form is always already marked by the shape, idioms, and imagery of religion. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 496

Categorization

• XREF: Directly portable to reading Naqvi’s Home Boy — the religious-resonant form question applies to a novel that is not overtly about faith.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what specifically are the ‘immanent means’ by which novelistic form is marked by religious shape, idioms, imagery? Morey flags this as his next move.