Laila Lalami
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a dystopian novel that comes disturbingly close to reality.
It opens when the central character, Sara Hussein, is detained at Los Angeles airport after returning from a business trip abroad. Because she had difficulty sleeping after giving birth to her twins, Sara had made the decision to install a brain implant (Dreamsaver) to help her sleep. An algorithm monitoring data from the implant records her dreams and flags her potential for violence. This potential for violence reflected in her dreams is deemed sufficient justification to incarcerate her at an all-woman retention center. Sara is required to await an evaluation period to determine whether or not she presents an imminent risk. And so her nightmare begins.
Combing the Orwellian world of omnipresent surveillance, monitoring, and thought police with the Kafkaesque world where the rules keep changing, where punishments are arbitrary, and where the sense of powerlessness and injustice permeate every aspect of life, Sara finds herself caught up in a labyrinth from which there seems to be no escape. Her short stay drags on for months and months. She proclaims her innocence throughout but to no avail. She is advised to keep her head down and obey the rules if she is to have any hope of getting out of there. She is allowed minimal contact with family and worries about her husband and children managing without her.
Sara’s guilt at being in the retention center prompts her to dredge up events from her past to try to ascertain where and why the algorithm flagged her as a potential criminal. Flashbacks from her past are peppered throughout. Lalami excels at capturing Sara’s interiority with her sense of frustration, anger, anxiety, humiliation, and powerlessness. Smatterings of emails, reports on the inmates, and excerpts from the corporate manual are inserted to reveal the operations of the system. The unsanitary conditions, the unappetizing meals, and the shortage of essential supplies are described in graphic detail. The pacing slows down when describing the repetitive activities in the center to capture the mind-numbing daily routines. Simple acts like watching an elderly woman outside her window as she waits for a bus constitute the highlight of Sara’s day.
What makes the novel so absorbing is Lalami’s ability to make this nightmare scenario vivid and plausible. Sara is an ordinary, law-abiding woman who gets tangled up in a terrifying web of unchecked surveillance, invasion of privacy, and intrusion into her innermost thoughts. She is deemed guilty until proven innocent. Lalami’s novel is a cautionary tale about technological control, data mining, and surveillance powers that proceed unchecked. What makes this scenario so terrifying is that it is, perhaps, too close for comfort.