THE DREAM HOTEL

A woman is detained under an American regime where even dreams are being surveilled.

Lalami’s stellar fifth novel concerns Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American woman who’s returning home from a conference in London to her family in L.A. when she’s held by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that uses biometric data to assess citizens’ “pre-crime” tendencies. She’s done nothing troubling, but her “risk score” is high enough to force a stay at an all-woman “retention center” that’s effectively a prison. Though her stay is supposed to be brief, the smallest hiccups lead to extensions, and the private-prison firm contracted by RAA charges extortionate rates for everything from emails to clean sheets; Sara and the other retainees are also expected to work to lower their scores, labor that partly involves feeding AI models. There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here—as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events, and Sara plots a similar small-scale resistance. But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined—interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped. (Not for nothing does she have a Borges book checked out of the library.) And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought. It’s a fiction-workshop cliche that dreams are unnecessary, but here they play a crucial role in the plot, opening up questions of what we’re sacrificing in the name of convenience and safety. The novel’s striking message is summarized in Sara’s retort to a bureaucrat who tells her the data doesn’t lie: “It doesn’t tell the truth, either.”

An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.