Sara Hussein hasn't committed a crime. But perhaps she was flagged because she dreamt about it. Or because of the heated argument she'd had with a crackpot on social media. Or maybe it was the images of early 20th-century Moroccan rebel fighters she'd been posting to the internet.
Whatever the cause, Sara now finds herself incarcerated in the California desert because an algorithm has determined she's an imminent risk. What exactly that risk may be and when and, under what conditions, she might be released, is anybody's guess.
This is the dystopian premise of Laila Lalami's gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel. In this unsettling vision of the future, a company called Dreamcloud makes brain implants that give insomniacs like Sara a better night's rest — while also harvesting valuable data from their dreams.
The blandly titled Risk Assessment Administration assigns individuals a score that determines how likely a person might be to commit a violent crime, but how that score is calculated is confidential. And the places where high-risk individuals are held for observation — called "retention centers" — are run by a private company called Safe-X that contracts out detainees out as cheap labor to corporations.
Into the crosshairs of these overlapping systems steps Sara, a busy, 30-something mother of twins who works as a museum archivist in Los Angeles. She is in the process of returning from a conference in London when an elevated risk score — based partly on data taken from her dreams — gets her dinged for retention at LAX.
The Dream Hotel has been compared to Philip K. Dick's 1956 science fiction novella, The Minority Report. That story imagined a society in which police arrest people for the crimes they have not yet committed based on data produced by a trio of humans with predictive powers.
But The Minority Report, with its snappy gumshoe dialogue, is told from the perspective of the police. Lalami, instead, sends us down the psychological rabbit hole of what it means to be incarcerated without due process — in a world where your fate is decided by algorithms.
The narrative is propulsive, but what makes the novel so absorbing are the ways the author makes this near-future world come to life. Much of the story is presented as an omniscient third-person narrative. But, in between, Lalami inserts fragments of emails, corporate reports, and bits of a procedural manual — all of which give insight into the systems that keep people like Sara indefinitely detained.
Ultimately, it is Sara who is the beating heart of this remarkable story. And Lalami gives us a character that isn't simply an archetype, but a real human being full of ambition and ambivalence. Sara is a scholar of postcolonial African history who works at the Getty Museum. She is also a woman who dwells on her insecurities and on petty annoyances — like the mundane squabbles she has with her husband. Occasionally, she is betrayed by her own irritability.
The novel credibly conveys her harrowing sense of disorientation as the wide world she once inhabited is reduced to a cell. Sara's most relatable trait is the struggle she faces trying to contain the rage that she feels over her situation — rage that, if expressed, will only worsen her circumstances. As the narrator tells us: "... compliance begins in the body. The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference."
It's a condition that isn't specific to her incarceration. As a woman of color — Sara is of Moroccan descent — she is not the kind of person who is generally afforded the benefit of expressing anger. To inhabit Sara's story is to hear the echoes of real people who are held in private immigration detention centers — who have no legal recourse and no timeline for when they might get released.
Her book also paints a grim picture about the ways in which our data can betray us. Lalami was inspired to write the novel after receiving a notification from her smartphone giving her the travel time to her yoga class — except she had never set such a reminder. Her phone was simply keeping track of her personal habits.
The Dream Hotel is a suspenseful novel. The book's simmering tension is whether Sara will be able to find a way out of this trap. This ordinary woman, who has plodded through life, has to figure out how to undermine a system that has overtaken her mind and her body.
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