Laila Lalami’s science fiction novel The Dream Hotel is not entirely speculative—it asks us to consider that we’re already in a future where data collection, wearable tech, AI, and fear allow terrible things to happen. Characters in Lalami’s novel have surrendered their freedom and privacy to tech. People sign terms of service without reading, knowing, or predicting how their data might be used. Meanwhile, corporations push further and further into their lives. Statistics can be bent to shape any narrative. Sound familiar?
The America Lalami describes is one in which preincarceration is a primary means of social protection. People are locked up before they do anything wrong to prevent them from perpetrating the crimes that their dreams and other data indicate they’re likely to commit. In this future—it would feel disingenuous to write that it’s one not too distant from our own, because it is already so close to our reality—a constant stream of citizens’ data feeds an algorithm that analyzes risk. Some even seem to believe this improves their safety and quality of life: “The algorithm knows what you’re thinking of doing, before even you know it. That’s a scientific fact. A forensic hold is for your own good, it prevents you from acting on your impulses.”
But Lalami’s novel also asks what can be done once we acknowledge our own complicity in creating and feeding the tech that can be used against us. The story centers on Sara T. Hussein, or Retainee M-7493002, as she comes to be known. Sara is a 38-year-old historian and mother, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, and a specialist in postcolonial Africa who works as a digital archivist at the Getty Museum. She’s detained at the airport while returning to the United States from a work trip. She scans her passport and is told her Risk Assessment score is too high. She is deemed a “Questionable” rather than a “Clear.” The rub? It’s not just omnipresent cameras and her social media posts, tech devices, thermostat, and actions that put her there. It’s also an analysis of her dreams, which are being surveilled by means of a neuroprosthetic device she voluntarily had put in to address poor sleep quality.
As a “Questionable,” Sara is sent to a retention center in Ellis, California, a fictional San Bernardino town 90 miles from Los Angeles. Women there are “free, under observation,” yet not free to leave. There she is able to glimpse only a sliver of California through her window, “a stretch of road bordered by creosote and, beyond it, a mountain…covered with creosote and brittlebrush that shiver at the slightest breeze.” The landscape and her dreams are her only escapes from the dehumanizing monotony of incarceration. Private thought is power and intimately tied to the landscape, one’s family, and one’s essential sense of self. Sara is terrified to dream, for fear of how her dream will be interpreted by the algorithm, yet it’s all she has.
When she first arrives at the Madison retention center, Sara reflects that it “was as if the agents were speaking a foreign tongue, in which the only mood was the imperative, the subject never stated. She couldn’t speak this language; she could only obey it.” Even in their attempts at obedience, the women in the facility are punished, their stays extended, their contact with the outside world interrupted. The algorithm—and, through it, the corporate systems controlling women’s lives while profiting from their existence—wants someone to blame, punish, and keep out of sight. Incarcerated? You’ve got a higher risk factor. Questioning stringent rules? The same. Your very imprisonment becomes a reason to keep imprisoning you. Sara’s retention is complicated by the profit-driven bureaucracy that benefits from its own incompetence because that incompetence forces the prisoners to stay longer. She suffers physically, and her pain is doubled because she’s missing time at home with her small children. Lalami steeps her narrative in historical and literary echoes of the inhumane incarceration of women and immigrants. During a brief visit with her small children, Sara feels not just “skin hunger, [as] the experts call it,” but “starvation.”
As an archivist, as well as a historian, Sara is acutely aware that the algorithm can get things wrong, so she begins to track her own dreams. “Unless the information was corrected quickly, it could become legitimate by virtue of its presence in the records.” In The Dream Hotel, private, personal recordkeeping is an act of resistance. Lalami’s prose, as in her earlier novels, is uniquely attuned to subtleties of character, language, and relationship—small gestures of language and the body—that have profound consequences. “Compliance begins in the body,” Sara observes of life at the retention center. “The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference.” A misstep means a loss of freedom and greater government intrusion into one’s independence.
Lalami unfolds this story by alternating chapters with time before and after Sara’s incarceration—framed by authorities in the novel as merely retention. As the women’s autonomy and basic human dignity are systematically and repeatedly stripped away from them, their memories and interior lives are all they have. In one of her daydreams, Sara remembers a trip to Yosemite’s Mirror Lake. The memory of that lake reminds the reader that Sara’s privacy and freedom—her ability to tell her own story—have all but disappeared. “Like a fortune-teller reading tea leaves, the algorithm made up stories as it was going along, until it found one that was plausible enough to please its audience.” Sara can never escape analysis by AI. And it’s impossible not to relate her loss of privacy to our own.
The Dream Hotel is not about Sara finding her independence or discovering her identity, as might be expected, but rather about her declaring that she will not operate within the system of the retention center, or ultimately the government and corporations that control her life. Sara eventually finds a kind of justice, but it is an unsatisfying kind of justice because it reminds us that there’s no escape from the invasion of tech. Given Lalami’s topic and our current reality that is a mere second hand’s tick from the world of The Dream Hotel, it can’t conclude with comfort. Home feels “so remote to [Sara]…that it’s become less a place than an idea, whose expanse she can hold in her mind but no longer inhabit.” Ideas of safety and safeguards around our most intimate selves drift farther and farther from us daily. Perhaps we’ve lost them already.•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
