Arriving home at Los Angeles international airport, Sara Hussein is asked by immigration and customs officers to step aside, then taken to an interview room. The fundamentals of this scene are familiar – you’ve probably watched something like it in a film, or dreamed about it happening to you; perhaps it already has. But Sara lives in a new world, several decades in the future, and she is being arrested because Scout, the state’s AI security system, has flagged something irregular inside her mind.
Sara seems unexceptional: she’s a museum archivist, married and mother to young twins. She once had an argument with her husband Elias after he impulsively part-exchanged the family Toyota for a Volvo. Sara sees herself as a person who “couldn’t possibly be considered a member of the lawbreaking classes”, until the moment at the airport when an officer informs her that her “risk score” is too high, and sends her to Madison, a California women’s retention centre housed in a former elementary school. At Madison, a record of good behaviour will lower her score; however, this record lies in the hands of her guards. She is not sufficiently subordinate, and can’t get her number down.
“Retainees” are held initially for 21 days, then on a rolling basis, potentially for ever. This isn’t punishment but risk management, for anybody considered likely to commit a crime. Every citizen has a risk score, extrapolated via algorithm from personal cloud data, from surveillance networks, and from the Dreamsaver – a widely used skull implant that delivers more restful sleep. The small print of Dreamsaver Inc grants the company rights to share the user’s dreams with the government. People are OK with this; it seems to have reduced terrorism.
The Dream Hotel is Laila Lalami’s fifth novel – earlier works received nominations for the Booker, Pulitzer and National book awards – and has been longlisted for the Women’s prize. Her 2020 nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, draws on her experiences as a Moroccan American to think about her adopted country’s two-tier system: how rights and freedoms are, in practice, exercised very differently across race, class, gender and national origin. Lalami’s fiction has explored the way these differences play out across a range of times and places: from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), on migrant experiences in modern Morocco, to The Moor’s Account (2014), inspired by the true story of a 16th-century Black man who survived a notorious Spanish colonial expedition to the Americas. Her most recent novel, 2019’s The Other Americans, is set in California in the shadow of the Iraq war, and follows the causes and repercussions of the moment when Driss, a Moroccan immigrant, is killed at an intersection by a speeding car.
In The Dream Hotel, Lalami turns to the future. The novel is especially interesting as a vision of how AI could weave itself into the two-tier system that she has described and reimagined in earlier works. Sara contrasts the apparent neutrality of Scout’s “new era of digital policing” with the racist treatment her Moroccan immigrant parents received at US airports during her childhood. However, familiar prejudices are built into new tools, which search for specific deviations from an enforced norm. Some bad arguments and weird dreams, a relative who has been in prison and a history of drug use are enough for conviction. Sara’s medical notes link to a record documenting that she was the victim of a sexual assault when she was 19. This adds three points to her risk score.
Reading The Dream Hotel is a physical experience: it’s rare for a novel to induce so strong a sense of powerlessness and frustration. Like many technologies, Lalami’s AI renders its users, from the individual to the state, simultaneously smarter and more stupid. It harvests vast quantities of data, then fundamentally misunderstands it. Meanwhile retainees’ hearings are randomly deferred; visits denied; phone calls cut off and overcharged; privacies invaded. “Prison is a place beyond shame.” Sara gradually absorbs the reality that she has become one of the people the state can punish. She dispatches emails of complaint to an interface whose blank replies denote impunity: “We are working to resolve service disruptions”; “This ticket is marked as resolved.”
In this sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes, what I found most powerful was the great bewilderment that the characters share. Lalami traces the upheaval of AI through systems and structures into personal lives, close relationships and quiet thoughts. Sara privately questions whether she has a hidden potential for violence. An interlude at the centre of the novel follows a tech executive who is straining to make sense of her vast yet miserable power.
Perhaps you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a novel in search of an experience of confusion. But The Dream Hotel has a burning quality, both in its swift, consuming escalation – you can’t look away – and in the clarity and purpose of what it shows. Sara is drawn into the bizarre logic through which imprisonment and a two-tier system make one another make sense. “She must’ve done something,” says one new retainee of a longtime resident. “I mean, if they’re keeping her here this long, then they must have something on her.”
• The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
