The Dream Hotel is a cautionary tale about what can happen when you don’t read the terms of service. In the near future of Laila Lalami’s unsettling, meticulously observed new novel, Americans are outfitting themselves with a neuroprosthetic implant called the Dreamsaver, marketed as a sleep aid. It turns out it’s also scanning wearers’ dreams and sharing them with the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal body that searches the data for indications the dreamers are potential criminals — then detains those it deems suspect.
The plot, you may notice, owes debts to Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report, in which three prophetic human “precogs” are hooked up to complicated machinery that reads their minds; they’re also yoked to a brutally efficient police apparatus that makes arrests based on their predictions. The specific prognostications may vary — the precogs can disagree among themselves — but there remains something essentially supernatural about their abilities. They can see the future, possessing a gift that’s ineffable, beyond understanding.
In The Dream Hotel, the supernatural is in short supply. Here, “precrime” allegations are based on hundreds of data inputs — dreams plus the usual stuff: criminal histories, social-media posts — run through an algorithm treated by its partisans with uncritical reverence. “The algorithm knows what you’re thinking of doing, before even you know it,” one character says. “That’s a scientific fact.” Of course, these dreams diagnose criminality no better than a Theranos blood test diagnoses illness: It’s uncut authoritarianism masquerading as technocratic surety, lacquered in Silicon Valley horseshit. And if that sounds familiar, let’s just say Lalami has her finger on the pulse of the magicless age in which we lately find ourselves living.
The author of four previous novels, an essay collection, and a book of short stories, Lalami has a knack for taking a flashy premise and underdelivering — that’s a compliment, by the way. The Other Americans (2019), for instance, unfolds as a mystery: After a Moroccan American restaurateur is killed in a hit-and-run, his family tries to figure out who’s done it, and why. Suspicion comes to rest on a neighboring business owner. Was it an interpersonal dispute, a racist animus, both? But when it comes, the answer seems almost beside the point; Lalami is more interested in how emotion works in extremis, using the suspenseful setup to smuggle in a sensitive exploration of the ways grief can rend the fabric of a family and, beyond, the community that surrounds it, surfacing latent resentments and buried passions.
In The Dream Hotel, she works like a gut rehabber, scraping any remnant of sci-fi sheen off the walls of the (decreasingly) futuristic premise. Her protagonist is Sara Hussein, a 38-year-old museum archivist detained at LAX on her way back from a London conference. Interrogated by security agents, Sara learns she’s been flagged by the algorithm for her elevated “risk score,” which 518; the threshold is 500. Her dreams have put her over the line.
Sara is taken to a California women’s facility for what’s supposed to be a 21-day monitoring period. But, as the novel opens, she’d been incarcerated for ten months, her stay extended every time she inadvertently violates some rule or another. Her fellow inmates are similarly situated, the whole scenario instantly recognizable. Nobody in charge will call this “prison” — it’s “retention,” in the lingo, compared by one security agent to “summer camp” — but it comes with all of prison’s routine intrusions and privations. The women pay exorbitant fees to communicate with loved ones on the outside. If they want free tampons, they have to consent to getting their periods tracked. They’re put to work for a company that has a contract with the prison management, which itself has been outsourced by the government to a private firm.
Lalami’s writing has often revolved around questions of migration, belonging, and the thin membrane that separates citizen from outsider; The Dream Hotel mines similar themes. Sara has training as a “historian of post-colonial Africa, specializing in independence movements and border formation.” (An intellectual of Moroccan descent, she bears some resemblances to her creator; Lalami was born in Casablanca and came to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics.) She finds resonances in her own experience of incarceration, playing out Lalami’s thesis, as it were, that none of this is particularly new: Empires have always relied on state-of-the-art technologies to surveil and control subject populations. Seeing a tablet with lists of detainees, work assignments, and “performance metrics,” Sara is “reminded of colonial censuses, the piles of ledgers maintained by small clerks across the empire, and that made the extraction of labor more efficient.” A mural in the detention facility — a converted elementary school, underscoring the impoverishment of the public sphere in this brave new world — is by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian American painter and Communist Party member questioned in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even the “risk score” that governs Sara’s fate is no great novelty — it sounds like a credit score.
With Sara attuned to the significance (and limitations) of the historical archive, Lalami also creates the sense that we, as readers, are watching an archive in the process of being constructed, weaving bits of documentary ephemera between chapters: facility meeting notes, memos, disciplinary reports. This clever gambit lets readers in on expository information we couldn’t access in the novel’s close third-person narration, but it also allows Lalami to make a subtler point. Like the hundreds of discrete inputs that supposedly build the case against Sara, each of these materials means little on its own. The data needs humans to do something that only humans can do: Connect the dots; build a story. Like Sara, Lalami is acutely attuned to the gap between spare bits of information and the narrative that might be made of them. Her finest book, The Moor’s Account (2014), was a resplendent retelling of a disastrous 16th-century expedition to the New World from the perspective of an enslaved person on the journey — whose appearance in the actual historical record is limited to a brief mention in the journals of the explorer Cabeza de Vaca.
The claustrophobic authorial perspective, coupled with narration in the present tense, creates a creeping sense of disorientation. On some level, Sara knows how ludicrous this all is. But as the months drag on, and as she contemplates the specific accusation leveled against her — the algorithm believes she poses a risk to her husband — her resolve wavers. She dips into a well of shame, a childhood incident in which her younger brother drowned in a neighbor’s pool while Sara was supposed to be watching him. She begins keeping a journal — a counter archive — to help wrench her dreams back into the place where they belong: the subjective, the personal. Both Sara and the algorithm have similar questions about her character, but with a critical distinction. The algorithm asks whether she’s a criminal — a purportedly objective query, referring to a socially constructed category, with a binary answer. The questions that haunt Sara are more profound, and beyond the ken of any processing system: Could I harm somebody? Am I a good person?
Disorientation makes sense for Sara, but the reader may occasionally pine for an omniscient perspective, a voice capable of building suspense in a narrative whose direction isn’t always clear. In the book’s second half, especially, events pile up that have the surface appearance of big drama — a wildfire, a norovirus outbreak, some chicanery Sara unearths on the part of the prison contractor. But each of these fits hazily into the larger machinery of plot, contributing little sense of propulsion toward the climax — which, when it comes, arrives a bit abruptly.
Still, these developments have a kind of oneiric logic to them — clearly relevant somehow, floating in loose relation, yet more information in a book that’s exhilaratingly overstuffed with it. There’s a lot of pleasure in reading them like tea leaves — indeed, like dreams — and contemplating what really matters, and why. As with The Other Americans, I came to rather admire the muted nature of this book’s denouement, which places Sara yet again in front of functionaries who hold her freedom in their hands while prostrating themselves to the algorithm: If lacking in high drama, it felt true. Sara, meanwhile, starts to better appreciate the ordinariness of her experience of incarceration. The pressures of driving down her risk score, acting the model prisoner — all that has foreclosed the possibility of meaningful connection with the other inmates, she realizes. The cure isn’t solitude but solidarity. “Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others,” she thinks. Data without context is pretext, to borrow a phrase; no woman is an island.
This isn’t Dick’s Minority Report, and it’s certainly not Steven Spielberg’s rollicking, ultrasleek 2002 film adaptation, with its magnetized streets and creepy high-tech pod-prisons. It’s worse than all that, an alarmingly likely approximation of what we’re all careering toward. Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present — which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonorable. And terrifying.