Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Powerful, richly conceived ... Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters ... Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, The Dream Hotel is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction.
Unsettling, meticulously observed ... Lalami has a knack for taking a flashy premise and underdelivering — that’s a compliment, by the way ... The claustrophobic authorial perspective, coupled with narration in the present tense, creates a creeping sense of disorientation ... Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present — which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonorable. And terrifying.
Lalami’s social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction The Dream Hotel often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara’s situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it ... Still, the novel’s central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people’s inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
