The Dream Hotel: A Novel
“What lingers is Lalami’s indisputable prescience—the book confronts us with our fears of occupying a society as indifferent as it is arbitrary . . .”
In the not-too-distant future depicted in Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, the United States is a paranoid, tech-saturated society where surveillance is unavoidable, corporations become more lucrative as they become more opaquely bureaucratic, and online indiscretions can land the naïve in unforeseeable straits. The more things change, yes?
Lalami’s dystopian tale ups the ante, however: Even the seemingly private domains of our unconscious minds are available for encroachment, and criminality is better pre-empted than punished. Take One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Minority Report, and a healthy splash of, unavoidably, Kafka, and something like the claustrophobic plausibility of The Dream Hotel emerges.
The novel charts the mandarin-orchestrated nightmare that overtakes 38-year-old Angeleno Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum. Following a conference in London, Sara’s nominally routine questioning at LAX turns interrogational and, bafflingly, lands her at a “retention” facility known as Madison two hours away. Apparently, Sara’s “risk score,” a tabulation similar to China’s Social Credit System but creepier, has spiked, suggesting she’s a candidate for imminent lawlessness—better to pack her away for a stretch than allow her to wreak havoc. Scared, humiliated, and separated from her husband and infant twins, Sara attempts to make sense of her predicament, no simple feat, given the obscure calculations (an argument with the wrong person? a childhood mishap? a silly post?) of the risk-tallying “algorithm.”
Madison’s attendants, most of whom are bored, and some of whom harbor dully sadistic inclinations, insist, with vacuous certainty, that the algorithm is “holistic.” It reigns, inscrutable and pervasive, like a deity—or Big Brother. “The algorithm knows what you’re thinking of doing, before even you know it,” Sara is informed. “A forensic hold is for your own good, it prevents you from acting on your impulses.” None of which makes sense to Sara, especially after she’s told she is likely homicidal.
Eventually, Sara attributes her elevated risk score to a recently implanted sleep aid that tracks—and likely misconstrues—her dreams. “Sara’s mind reeled, thinking about the consent forms she signed the day she got the implant. They said nothing about the sale of dreams to a third party, much less a government entity.” Turns out maybe she should have read the fine print more closely.
That overlooked provisions in a terms-of-service agreement might land a person in carceral limbo feels very nearly a contemporary anxiety, and Lalami is particularly adept at imagining corporate jargon and branding. Companies, software, and services such as Safe-X, OmniCloud, PostPal, Scout, and PressBot all seem as though they might already exist.
Madison, too, the facility in which much of the story takes place, is sufficiently, vibrantly oppressive to seem an actual place. Its occupants are “watched from lenses on the ceiling, their behavior scrutinized for the slightest infraction, their conversations monitored for clues of intent. A nod, a whisper, a joke: under the right circumstances, anything can be made into something sinister, to bulk up their files.” The indignities at Madison are pathetic and chilling: “[In] . . . the infirmary . . . women can get pads or tampons at no expense if they agree to have their periods tracked.”
As one administrative delay after the next slows Sara’s legal challenges to her retention, the boundaries between dreams and reality—even her memories—begin to lower. She second-guesses both her reactions and her emotions; she becomes pessimistic about her prospects for eventual release. “Perhaps it is true . . . that the algorithm knows [me] better than [I] know [myself],” she considers. Even her previous work as an archivist feels pliable, history as just another subjective and shifting point of view. Old doubts about the degree to which she is responsible for her own misfortunes—a childhood fear—rise up.
Sara retains just enough objectivity, however, to weather the novel’s upheavals, as Lalami burdens the second half of her story with contending storylines—dangerous wildfires, a raging virus, a burgeoning resistance within Madison, profiteering shenanigans from a tech company. Each seem poised to carry the story forward but then recede. Some readers may feel The Dream Hotel, while undeniably gripping, is ultimately circular, its strengths more conceptual than narrative. What lingers is Lalami’s indisputable prescience—the book confronts us with our fears of occupying a society as indifferent as it is arbitrary: “That (the retainees) have committed no crime is beside the point,” we are told of Madison’s captives. “In any case crime is relative, its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power.” The stuff of bad dreams.