The novel form resists being repurposed for transcendental religious belief

Evidence

In other words, Minaret appears to reveal the difficulty of attempting to move the secular individualist form of the novel back to its spiritual roots, to fill an art form etched by three hundred years of secular individualism with a sense of God as a real presence. The difficulty of this task is reflected in the novel’s interpretative crises and challenges and in the collision between its spiritual agenda and the banality of its chosen form. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Direct hinge to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where Changez’s monologue form is likewise a secular/realist vehicle holding a spiritual-political agenda — parallels the collision Morey describes.
• QUESTION: Does Hamid’s dramatic monologue succeed where Minaret’s plain prose fails, by refusing prosaic realism altogether? Worth testing against Morey’s framework.