What The Hell America!

The Dream Hotel
by Laila Lalami
Pantheon, 336 pp., $29

SARA HUSSEIN, 37, HISTORIAN, ARCHIVIST at the Getty, and married mother of twins, is returning to California from a conference in London when she is pulled aside by officers of the Risk Assessment Administration. Her risk score, checked by the AI at the gate, is too high; the algorithm has determined that she may be a risk to her husband. Sara’s risk score is assembled by an algorithm from an agglomeration of data: social media posts, medical history, relationship status, legal background. But most importantly, thanks to the shiny new “Dreamsaver” sleep aid device implanted in Sara’s head, her risk score can be affected by the content of her dreams. She will need to come with them for a brief forensic observation; it shouldn’t take more than twenty-one days, not so long as she follows the rules. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it?

Such is the conceit of Laila Lalami’s fifth and latest novel, The Dream Hotel. As one might expect, Sara spends more than the promised twenty-one days in custody, held with at least fifty other women in a repurposed elementary school known as “Madison.” Her retention is “precaution, not punishment.”

The attendants bristle when one of the women calls Madison a jail. This is a retention center, they say, it’s not a prison or a jail. You haven’t been convicted, you’re not serving time. You’re being retained only until your forensic observation is complete. . . . The attendants never call the women prisoners. They say retainers, residents, enrollees, and sometimes program participants.

Sara spends her days fretting over the time she is missing with her children and husband, reading, working in the retention center’s laundry or doing grunt work for an AI firm that has contracted with the retention center’s corporate ownership, worrying about her legal case, and writing down her dreams. As her case drags out, and the conditions at Madison deteriorate, Sara comes to know her fellow “retainees,” and begins to engage in acts of resistance.

The early descriptions of Sara’s arrest at the airport and arrival at the retention center are appropriately chilling and disorienting: At one point, Sara berates herself for getting snippy with the arresting officers, noting that “She’d passed up so many chances to demonstrate her docility that she had only herself to blame for what happened.” The necessary worldbuilding is accomplished quickly and painlessly, largely via excerpts from press releases and newspaper articles. The dehumanizing Panopticon of the retention center is credibly drawn without the sort of prurient brutality that could easily have turned this novel about a prison full of women into a women-in-prison novel.

Yet once the world is built, not much becomes of it. The table is beautifully set but the meal itself is bland and predictable; competent, but far from inspired.

This is not to say there’s nothing to appreciate about The Dream Hotel; a few of the details of the surveillance in the retention center are vividly unpleasant, such as the quiet mention halfway through the book that pads or tampons are only provided to the inmates for free if they agree to have their periods tracked. One scene shows Sara sitting in the multi-faith worship space at the retention center, attended to by “an old-generation NuSpirit . . . waiting to beam sermons in any faith or language that matches the face and file on record.” She begins to think about the role that prophetic dreams play in many religions:

But surely, a voice inside her says, premonition has value only because it is so rare. Every night people dream multiple dreams, most of which have no meaning. They’re little more than electrical activity in the brain, evidence that the sleeping self is alive, and at play. How many dreams did Joseph have apart from the one that predicted his rise to power in Egypt? Imagine if the sages had built religions around those, too.

But in general, once The Dream Hotel has established how its systems work and roughly who its characters are, the rest of the novel unfolds without major surprises in either plot or characterization. The for-profit company that runs the retention center continues to try to extract as much profit as it can out of its residents, the sadistic guard continues to be sadistic, Sara continues to be certain she doesn’t belong in the retention center, and the residents realize they will need to work together if they are going to improve their situation. The ultimate resolution to the plot is perfectly believable, but entirely too clean. There is little here that wasn’t done already in Nineteen Eighty-Four, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Parable of the Sower, or The Minority Report.

THE BOOK IS, IN FACT, SUFFUSED with a sort of antiseptic odor, as if anything that might have made anyone too uncomfortable has been carefully scrubbed away. (In one peculiar moment, as the book has not otherwise censored its swear words—“fuck” appears sixteen times—the narration undergoes an unexpected fit of Victorian propriety and describes Sara as “cussing” another person with a mysterious “word so nasty it instantly brings color to [another character’s] cheeks.”) It is this sterility that robs the central questions of The Dream Hotel of any lasting power. The book is, again, about a lightly dystopian future where if you dream wrong, you can go to jail for months on end, there to be exploited by greedy for-profit prison companies. The clear message of the book is that such a world, such a system, would be very bad. I think every American (with the possible exception of Peter Thiel) would agree that we should not create the Torment Nexus that is the dream-policing device. But The Dream Hotel opens as though it is going to take this proposal seriously:

You’re a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would. Whenever a woman’s murder captures headlines, your first instinct is to ask why no one did anything about the cuts and bruises for which she sought treatment, the boyfriend’s repeated violations of the court’s restraining order, the alarming texts he sent, which laid out in detail what he planned to do. . . . Picture the women. . . . What if you could save them from these monsters? You don’t even have to do anything; you’ve already agreed to the terms of service.

The inciting incident that led to the passage of the Crime Prevention Act, we learn, was a mass shooting at a Super Bowl halftime show “in which 86 people were shot dead on live television before the broadcast was pulled by CBS.” When the FBI investigated, they found a “long trail of evidence,” including domestic violence complaints, ammunition purchases, and internet searches on how to bypass stadium security. By the time of the book’s events, some 62 percent of the American public supports the Crime Prevention Act, and the head of the Risk Assessment Administration cites a 42.6 percent decrease in gun deaths and a 48 percent decrease in “deaths by suicide.” The dream-policing device is far from the only tool used by the RAA; it’s just yet another source of data available to the algorithm.

Lalami thus, at the beginning of the book, appears to be setting up a slightly more nuanced debate than we actually get in the rest of the text. I would hardly expect her to have ever come down on the side of the dream-police (nor would I want her to), but a version of this book that more openly discusses why someone who is not a cartoon supervillain might be attracted to a Risk Assessment Administration would have been a more interesting work of art, even if (or perhaps because) it might have made readers a little more uncomfortable.

The residents of Madison that we meet are uniformly not the sort of people who set off alarm bells in the reader’s mind. Presumably, in the universe of the book, all of those folks are held somewhere else; certainly, there are many more facilities beyond just Madison, and references are made to at least one location filled with men who are under investigation for possible future gun crimes. Yet because we don’t meet any of these other people, we can only view the central question of the book through the lens of people who do not appear to be any sort of physical threat to anybody, though admittedly they are only sketched: Emily is a firefighter who draws comic books about a pyrokinetic superhero; Victoria is a card shark and a flirt; Marcela plays the guitar.

We do, however, spend a lot of time reading about Sara’s dreams, which range from nightmares about starting a hearing without her attorney to the obligatory embarrassing sex dream to visions in which she, indeed, causes harm or death to her husband. Most of these dreams are oddly prosaic, lacking the peculiar, psychedelic logic that I find characterizes many of my dreams. (The one exception is a dream in which Sara flies around Los Angeles on a volant carrot, accompanied by Albert Finney.) It is presented as self-evident to any reader that these dreams are not indicative of some deep-seated desire to murder her husband. Yet one can imagine a version of this book in which at least some of Sara’s dreams are far more disturbing and worrying to the average person. If Sara’s dreams looked more like Saw movies, would the dream-police have a point?

Contrast this antiseptic quality with Lalami’s third novel, The Moor’s Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. In The Moor’s Account, Lalami described the adventures of Mustafa al-Zamori (called, by his captors, Estebanico), a real-life black Moroccan man enslaved by Spaniards and taken on the ill-fated Narvaez expedition, which went looking for gold in Florida in 1527 and ended in disaster for all but four of its members. In the real world, we know very little about this man beyond a few throwaway lines written by the man who enslaved him and later wrote a description of the expedition; in her book, Lalami allows Mustafa to write his own account. He journeys from Florida to modern-day Texas and Mexico, watching as the Spaniards do terrible things to the Native population, and as some of the Native Americans do terrible things in return to the Spaniards.

It’s a beautifully nuanced book, one that never loses sight of the fundamental horrors of slavery and conquest, but that does not feel the need to paint the victims of such crimes as sinless paragons. Mustafa is now a slave, but in his previous life as a wealthy merchant, he had once sold slaves himself; some of the Native American societies they meet are nearly utopian, but others are almost as violent and brutal as the Spaniards themselves. None of this excuses the dreadful crimes committed by the Spaniards against any of their victims; I would argue that this more honest picture of the world conveys more accurately how horrible these crimes were. A terrible thing is not terrible only because of the innocence of its victims; it is a terrible thing to enslave or conquer another human being, no matter who that human being is.

Advocates for criminal justice reform in the real world will often focus on innocent people who have been put to death or otherwise punished, because those stories are much more obviously persuasive to undecided listeners. Yet a principled opposition to capital punishment, for instance, need not be based only on its error rate; one could, and many people do, oppose capital punishment categorically, regardless of whether or not the defendant committed the crime at issue. Is that the appropriate tack to take with the RAA and its dream-policing? Whatever its answer, a different, more interesting version of this book might have been able to ask that question in a more meaningful fashion. As it is, The Dream Hotel’s political argument exists at about the level of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is a very enjoyable movie, but is not a very serious work of speculative fiction.