Books Read: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
The Trump admin will be taking notes
Back when I read the nominees for every major literary award1, I came across Laila Lalami’s terrific novel The Other Americans (a National Book Award finalist six years ago). Since then, I’ve been waiting to see what she does next. What I wasn’t expecting was for Lalami to traipse into my territory—speculative fiction—with her latest, The Dream Hotel, a novel that does for the subconscious what Jessamine Chan’s The School For Good Mothers did for motherhood.
Madison isn’t a prison. Absolutely not. The former school is now a retention centre where women are held until their “forensic observation” is complete. Thirty-eight-year-old mother of twins, Sarah Hussein, is one such inmate—sorry, guest. Like the others, she’s tagged and surveilled, chosen by an algorithm that flagged her as a dissident on the verge of violence. Sarah is the victim—sorry, beneficiary—of a system that, Minority Report–style, detains people before they do anything wrong. Her stay at Madison was meant to last twenty-one days. It’s been closer to a year. And yet Sarah has no choice but to follow Madison’s strict rules, hoping to improve her risk score, hoping to see her family again.
In one sense, I hate that this novel exists. I fear it’ll give the Trump administration ideas about how to better manage society and efficiently deport people. Then I realise they’re probably already planning something like the “Risk Assessment Administration”2 , and all the novel is doing, rather too effectively, is show what that world, that flavour of fascism, might look like.3 The scene where Sarah is apprehended at the airport after a trip to London is especially chilling, not just because she’s clearly done nothing wrong, but because the scenario feels only a stone's throw away from what’s happening now, except that Sarah is an American citizen. Not a tourist.
We learn the algorithm was developed in the wake of a Super Bowl mass shooting that, rather than lead to stricter gun control, sees citizens lose their right to privacy and the creation of a ginormous surveillance database. This database pulls information from over two hundred sources, including an individual’s dreams, not through telepathy or magic, but via a neuro-prosthetic device called Dreamsaver. Marketed as a productivity tool, Dreamsaver compresses sleep, making four hours feel like eight, while harvesting users’ subconscious thoughts. It’s Sarah’s violent dreams—suggesting she might murder her husband—that nudge her risk score over the edge and land her in Madison (the “Dream Hotel”) for observation. For Sarah, having her dreams teased apart raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about her marriage, about her parents, about herself.
But the Dream Hotel isn’t just another surveillance capitalism/AI dystopia novel. Without giving too much away, we come to learn how Dreamsaver Inc. is manipulating the inmates in Madison (including Sarah) to plump up the bottom line. It’s this aspect of the novel that’s most anger-inducing because a technology like Dreamsaver could be beneficial to so many people who struggle to get seven good hours of sleep (including at least an hour of deep sleep). But capitalism—early, middle or late stage—can’t help itself. Everything must be commodified. Once you sign the user agreement, you become the product.
It’s fine. I’ve stopped.
This is very Trump/Elon/Stephen Miller:
The mission of the RAA is to keep American communities safe. We are committed to identifying public safety risks and investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes. Using advanced data analytics tools, we keep law-abiding Americans safe from harm, while also protecting their privacy. Our core principles are care, respect, and responsibility.
There’s something horrifically cynical in the fact that Sarah’s job at Madison—because everyone works—is to train the generative AI for a movie studio. Well played, Lalami, well played.