The Dream Hotel. By Laila Lalami. Pantheon; 336 pages; $29. Bloomsbury; £16.99
HOW DO YOU concoct a plausible fictional near-future, in which people’s reliance on technology has gone too far? If you read “The Dream Hotel”, a gripping new novel, you can discern one recipe. First, take a big handful of “1984”, with Big Brother and the surveillance state reimagined with private-sector incentives. Sprinkle in the rational irrationality of Joseph Heller’s and Franz Kafka’s best works. Next mix in a dollop of “Minority Report” (2002), a film starring Tom Cruise in which law enforcement solves “pre-crimes” before people commit heinous acts.
So far, so Orwell. However, “The Dream Hotel” is intriguing and (mostly) satisfying, even if the ingredients feel familiar, for what the novel says about the creep of technology and the trade-offs people make for convenience.
Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American novelist and former finalist for a Pulitzer prize and National Book Award, tells her dystopian tale by combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s terms of service, medical reports, meeting minutes and customer-service email chains from hell. The novel’s protagonist is Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum who returns from a work trip to London and runs afoul of bureaucrats at immigration control, who say her “risk-assessment” score is too high and that she could pose a threat to her husband’s life. Sara becomes “Retainee M-7493002”, held at a facility for what is supposed to be 21 days of monitoring but stretches much longer.
What went so wrong? In retrospect it was a mistake to get the “Dreamsaver”, a small implant invented by a medical-tech firm in Silicon Valley that Sara agreed to have installed during a desperate period of sleep deprivation. (She had recently had twins.) “Imagine what you could do with more time” was the alluring sales pitch, but it came at a dear price: the device tracked her dreams and shared them with third-party firms and the government.
“The Dream Hotel” evokes a world reminiscent of China’s social-credit system, in which citizens are assessed on a variety of metrics, with a touch of America’s private-prison complex. (“Retainees” are charged vast sums for snacks and internet service and depend on family to deposit money in their accounts.) AI, algorithms, augmented reality and facial recognition all feature in the novel.
Americans, who in real life are suspicious of the “deep state”, accept surveillance in Ms Lalami’s story because a gunman shot 86 people at the Super Bowl as millions watched the atrocity live. Tracking and mining data for the sake of crime-fighting became socially acceptable. While in custody Sara reads a newspaper editorial supporting “our bias-free, science-based crime-prevention system”; “retention”, it argues, is a “humane tool for reducing violence because it saves…communities both the trauma of the crime and the cost of prosecuting it”. There is no mention of what society gives up—in personal liberty and freethinking—in the name of progress.
Dystopian fiction is booming: five classic novels, including “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”, saw a boost in sales after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. But writing it is not for the faint of heart. So many scenarios have already been imagined; others can feel unimaginatively real. Ms Lalami explores themes that authors before her have already artfully unpacked. But readers will still want to check out “The Dream Hotel”—and be grateful they never have to check in. ■
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