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Associated Press
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Book Review: ‘The Dream Hotel' is a dystopian world in which people are detained for dreams
Anyone who spends time on the internet knows that our demographics, preferences and interests are assiduously tracked by Big Tech companies hoping to capture more of our dollars. They record our keystrokes, time spent on certain web pages, how long we hover over different subjects. What if those companies shared the information with a government intent on tracking our every move to determine not only if we had broken the law, but planned to commit crimes? That's the question that Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami explores in her new novel 'The Dream Hotel,' published this month. In this novel that recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka, protagonist Sara Hussein is detained at the airport as she returns to Los Angeles from a conference in London. Because a sleep device controlling her insomnia allows her dreams to be tracked without her knowledge, Sara has been deemed likely to commit a violent crime and taken to a 'retention center' for 21 days of observation. That period is repeatedly extended unilaterally by center employees for infractions such as using an unapproved hair style or loitering in a hallway. Sara is Moroccan American like Lalami, who has dug deep into her heritage for past novels including 'The Moor's Account,' which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2015. Lalami's bestselling 2019 novel 'The Other Americans,' is about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant in the U.S. The controls that Sara suddenly finds herself subject to stem from the Crime Prevention Act that Congress passed after 86 people were shot dead on live television during a Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. The broadcast watched by 118 million viewers was rapidly pulled off the air and another 32 people were killed off camera. Outraged citizens noted that the shooter's past was littered with red flags that could have prevented the killings – several cases of domestic violence, the recent purchase of bump stocks and ammunition on a personal credit card, his grievances against a team doctor. Backers of the act focused on the idea of using commercial data analysis as an investigative tool by law enforcement, and granting government broader access to private records, leading to the identification and detention of people deemed likely to commit violent crimes. A new Risk Assessment Administration began tracking many aspects of citizens' lives like a credit agency collects data on loan repayments and credit card usage. Getting evicted, fired, even suffering a mental health crisis could all be cause for suspicion that an individual was likely to commit violence. In Sara's case, additional tracking can be done through a device embedded in a patient seeking care for sleep issues that can read their dreams. The stated mission is to keep American communities safe using advanced data analytics tools to investigate suspicious individuals and identify public safety risks to prevent future crimes. At the retention center operated by the Safe-X company, Sara yearns for nearly a year to be reunited with her husband and their twin toddlers, a girl and boy. Sara doesn't even remember the dream that made her subject to retention — a nightmare about killing the spouse she loves. 'Police officers used to patrol neighborhoods they called 'rough,' stopping and searching people they thought were suspicious,' Lalami writes, 'now they sift through dreams.'
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What if Your Dreams Could Land You in Prison?
'The Dream Hotel,' the fifth novel by the acclaimed Moroccan American writer Laila Lalami, is set in a near-future reality only a notch or two on the dystopian dial away from our present. Its protagonist, Sara Hussein, is a museum archivist in her late 30s, living in Los Angeles with her husband, Elias, and their toddler twins. As a new mother suffering the rigors of insomnia, she finds relief in something called a Dreamsaver, an ingenious neuroprosthetic device that ensures high-quality sleep. Embedded in the device's terms of service, however, is a clause allowing the extraction and sale of its users' biometrical data, including the content of their dreams. Sara becomes aware of this only when she is detained at LAX on her return from a conference in London. It's a couple of decades in the future, and the state keeps tabs on its citizens by way of a risk score — somewhere between China's social credit system and a credit rating — which calculates the likelihood of their committing a crime. Among the data sources for such assessments are dreams, supplied wholesale by the makers of the Dreamsaver. And Sara has been having dreams about poisoning her husband, which the government's Risk Assessment Administration (R.A.A.) reads, with insistent literal-mindedness, as a direct expression of a desire. Lalami's dystopian premise here will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip K. Dick's novella 'The Minority Report' (or seen the 2002 Spielberg adaptation), set in a future where people are incarcerated for offenses they have yet to commit. 'The Dream Hotel' shares some of this dystopian DNA, but the forebear it nods most knowingly toward is Kafka. At one point, an incarcerated Sara recalls a trip to Prague, and a visit to the Castle; later she checks out 'The Metamorphosis' from the prison library. Sara spends most of the novel attempting to negotiate the nightmarishly dense bureaucracy of the R.A.A., and of the so-called retention system in which she is being held. Though the initial period of retention is only 21 days, the staff at Madison, the facility where she is kept, find continual cause for extension. 'Retainees' perform unpaid labor on behalf of the private corporation that runs the facility. They are constantly breaking rules they didn't know existed; once you're in the system, it quickly becomes clear, your detention, which is entirely at the pleasure of an unseen and 'holistic' algorithm, is essentially indefinite. Safe-X, the company that runs the retention facilities, makes most of its money 'from the postponements it generated through its complicated disciplinary system.' Despite the influence of Kafka and Dick, the novel's most obvious reference points are in the American present. One long and vivid sequence takes place against the backdrop of a Los Angeles consumed by wildfire. And anyone who has had the misfortune to find themselves snarled in the gears of Customs and Border Protection at a U.S. airport might read the extended account of Sara's initial detention with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Though not much is explicitly made of it, Sara shares with her creator a Moroccan background; the notion of people being punished for the perceived likelihood of committing a crime might seem less speculative to readers of Middle Eastern heritage. The book also clearly has its sights set on what Shoshana Zuboff terms 'surveillance capitalism,' as well as on the kind of algorithmic, predatory policing discussed in Jackie Wang's 'Carceral Capitalism.' Lalami's social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction 'The Dream Hotel' often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara's situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it. The third-person present-tense narration keeps us close to Sara's thoughts, but those thoughts too often reveal the presence of a heavy editorializing hand. And so we find her thinking, for instance, 'it's the parasitic logic of profit, which has wormed its way so deeply into the collective mind that to defy lucre is to mark oneself as a radical, or a criminal, or a lunatic.' Her train of thought is, elsewhere, pressed into service as a vehicle for plot exposition: 'OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace, Sara thinks, its only serious competition the Chinese conglomerate that a handful of senators want to outlaw.' Still, the novel's central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people's inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
Los Angeles Times
27-02-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Forget thought crime. People are incarcerated for dream crime in this near-future novel
It's overwhelming to think of how carefully tracked we are by private interests at this point in time: what we buy, what we watch, what we search online, what we want to know about other people — and who we know and how well. Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' describes the perfect storm of extractive profit-seeking and privacy erosion that drives so much of contemporary life. When it comes to today's corporations, she explains, our lives are the product, and the power that's accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogates our basic rights in ways that we have not yet figured out how to fight through collaborative action. Our ability to mobilize, she suggests, 'will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.' You can feel the influence of these concerns in Laila Lalami's powerful, richly conceived fifth novel about pre-crime, 'The Dream Hotel' — out March 4. Set in the near future, the book's corporatized reality is slightly more twisted than ours but entirely plausible, a place where private greed has resulted in a disturbing bureaucracy with no true due process. As the novel opens, Moroccan American mother and archivist Sara Hussein is in Madison, a 120-bed 'retention' center near Los Angeles, run by a private company, where, in the interests of crime prevention, people whose dreams have marked them as high-risk for committing crimes are kept under steady, intrusive observation. According to the powers that be, Sara is being held because she dreamed of killing her husband. And while she refuses to believe this means something bigger, she also worries about all the holes in her knowledge; throughout the novel, Lalami plays out the shiftiness and uncertainty of reality when dreams are given more predictive weight than facts to stunning effect. Sara has been inside so long — at the start of the book, 281 days — that communication from her husband has slowed, and she fears that he has started to believe she is guilty. When a new woman is admitted to the facility, her naive assumptions about how the system works — the result of ignorance that seems at first to mirror our own — counter Sara's experience-driven awareness of problems. After having twins, and struggling to get enough sleep, Sara had agreed to surgery that outfitted her with a neuroprosthetic — the private company's promise was that you could feel rested after shorter periods of sleep, but under the principles of surveillance capitalism, its reach has since expanded into people's private, inner lives and become a basis for what amounts to incarceration, though it's not labeled such. 'Once dreams became a commodity, a new market opened — and markets are designed to grow. Sales must be increased, initiatives developed, channels broadened.' We'll later discover that, in line with surveillance-capitalist impulses, the company is not only watching but also cultivating product placement in dreams. Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters. By training, Sara is a historian of postcolonial Africa, and her career has been spent as a digital archivist at the Getty Museum. She maps what she knows of archives to the operation of algorithms, understanding that the latter work according to search terms provided by a human with limited knowledge, and that, therefore, its method for seeking out pre-crime is profoundly fallible. The book kicks off with Lalami's clever marketing language for the dream surveillance device: 'You're a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would.' By flattering people's sense of themselves as good, as wanting to stop crimes against women and children — not so different from the curtailment of civil liberties after 9/11, where the risks of terrorism were treated on balance as drastically more significant than preserving individual freedoms — the device has become normalized. What makes use of the device so insidious is not simply the monitoring, of course, but that trivial actions, and even non-actions, mere thoughts, lead inexorably to nightmarish scenarios. The retention center has procedures that purportedly adhere to due process, but as in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' or Vladimir Sorokin's 'The Queue,' where bureaucracy stands in the way of getting anywhere, every time it seems like Sara's time in the facility is about to be over, something trivial occurs to push her hearing date back, or to otherwise deny her release. Unlike those atmospheric novels in which the central authority in the bureaucracy remains inaccessible, Lalami not only renders Sara relatable through mentions of mundane things like hiking with her husband or caring for babies but also builds the perspectives of some of the villains of the piece with nuance. It's not only the claustrophobia of an enclosed space with strangers or control-seeking authorities but time itself that creates the feeling of dread. Lalami writes, 'Each day resembles the one that came before it, the monotony adding to the women's apprehension and leading them to make decisions that damage their cases.' The novel takes a fascinating turn, one that calls up Zuboff's insights that we haven't yet developed forms of collaborative action to counter surveillance capitalism, when Sara realizes that she and other retained people do have a tool to fight back, namely the work they do while incarcerated. It's a clever progressive pivot that tamps down the dystopian vibes that support the original premise of the book. At one point, Sara looks at a mural and notices that the laborers depicted are watched by a painted foreman, 'and later by the artist in his studio, and later yet by her, the process transforming them from people into objects.' But, even in its awareness that subjectivity is stripped away when people are treated as data points, the novel refuses a grim understanding of how people might become damaged in their behavior toward one another while under surveillance (changes to behavior seen in East Berlin, North Korea, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and other places in the world that have fallen to totalitarianism). Rather, as with her other novels, there's a softhearted universalism to Lalami's treatment of surveillance capitalism. Hers is one in which humans retain the ability to trust one another enough to forge working solidarities and authentic collaborations. Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, 'The Dream Hotel' is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction. Lalami's realistic approach to Sara and others, inflected with leftist politics and history, elides any sharp division we might imagine about where we've been and what we face ahead. 'Maybe past and present aren't all that different,' Sara thinks at a critical moment. 'The strange thing — the amazing thing, really — is that we've managed to find workarounds to surveillance.' Within the latter part of the novel, it's not the stuff of tragedy or alarm about the human condition we encounter, but surprising, unadulterated hope. Felicelli is a novelist and critic who served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-24.
