Art & Kinship: Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel

The Ancestor Trouble newsletter has a new name, Meditations on Kinship. In this installment: Laila Lalami's gripping The Dream Hotel and what it owes to her mom's brutal childhood in an orphanage.

Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Dream Hotel, is chilling, propulsive, intensely timely, and impeccably wrought. The book focuses on Sara, a young mother returning from a business trip abroad who’s impatient to get home to her husband and twin toddlers when she finds herself pulled aside at the Los Angeles airport, held for no apparent reason, and then detained. There are no charges, not exactly. She’s told that her “risk score” for committing a crime is too high. So she’s sent to a “retainment facility” to prevent her from harming her husband. Never mind that she’s never considered harming him—during her time in confinement Sara’s morale will dip so low that she’ll eventually begin to question herself.

This is the first Sara has heard of her risk score. Having neglected to read the terms of service for her sleep implant, the Dreamsaver, she didn’t realize the same feature that allows users to share their dreams with friends on social media also allows the government to surveil people for what turns up in their subconscious while they’re sleeping. Under the government’s criteria, she’s a risk. Other factors play into the score as well—her Moroccan heritage seems to tie into the suspicion in subtle ways—but the dream is what tips the scale.

Notwithstanding the subject matter, the book is never sensationalistic or hectoring. It doesn’t read like science fiction, but as though it’s happening now. The writing is suspenseful yet exact. As always in Lalami’s work, there’s a steadiness to the narration; no matter how outlandish the situation, you’re never in the hands of hyperbole. She’s spoken of herself as a “guest” in the English language—one of at least three languages in which she’s fluent—and of writing dialogue as something occasionally akin to internally translating from Arabic into English, which may have something to do with the laser accuracy of the language.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the retention facility, with its cruel guards, overpriced snacks, unreliable yet price-gouging system for communicating with family, bland living quarters, and morning inspections, feels accurate. Stays like Sara’s are supposed to be a few weeks but frequently stretch on for months or years because of bureaucratic delays and invented infractions. Illness spreads; a wildfire rages. Sara keeps a journal where she details her dreams, including an odd recurring theme of carrots. Her skill at the strange but ominous-seeming work the detainees are encouraged to take on in order to potentially hasten their release made me fear she’d never get out.

Lalami is a widely and justly celebrated writer, and one of my favorites. From my perspective, her magnum opus remains The Moor’s Account (2014), but The Dream Hotel is equally accomplished and compelling in its way. Her other works include two novels—Secret Son and The Other Americans—a story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits; and her nonfiction work Conditional Citizens.

In addition to being an exceptional novelist and thinker, Lalami is a friend, someone I met in the aughts, in my earliest blogging days. We were both writing about books and writers and criticizing the Iraq War, so that our sites were being visited by the Department of Homeland Security every morning. In its focus on immigration, curtailment of rights, and conditional citizenship, her work feels like a logical extension of everything she was thinking and writing online back then. In the ensuing years, we’ve often discussed the worrying mutations of surveillance, including "mugshots" created from DNA.

For the Art & Kinship series, I invited Lalami to share how, if at all, her ancestors or any aspect of her understanding of kinship more broadly may have influenced The Dream Hotel. This was her thoughtful reply:

When I started writing The Dream Hotel in 2014, I set the action inside a tech company whose sleep device allows access to people’s dreams. But I found that after a couple of chapters I wasn’t enjoying the setting as much as I thought I would, so I put the book aside to work on a different novel, this one about a family grieving the loss of their patriarch (The Other Americans.) Then in the spring of 2020, I picked up my abandoned manuscript and gave it another go, this time deciding to set it in what I called a “retention facility,” a place where people are held not because they’ve committed a crime, but because their dreams suggest that they might in the future.

Confined environments have always fascinated and terrified me. Asylums, reformatories, sanatoriums, internment camps, leper colonies, workhouses—all these are miniature societies that both reflect and refute the world that created them. The source of this fascination wasn’t really clear to me, but it became obvious to me when I began working in earnest on The Dream Hotel. My mother grew up in a French orphanage in Morocco, a highly traumatic experience that left her with a lifelong fear of nuns.

The orphanage had been established during the colonial era, and it sustained itself financially through the labor of the children it took in its charge. From the age of about eight, girls were taught the Moroccan art of needlework, especially Tarz Fassi and Tarz Meknesi. They embroidered tablecloths and napkins, runners and doilies, sheets and pillowcases that were sold to wealthy families. In exchange for this labor, the girls were given room and board and a basic education. Verbal and physical abuse was rampant.

Although my novel is set in the future, and focuses on technological surveillance, it likely wouldn’t be the book it is without the stories my mother shared with me when I was growing up.

If you’re in NYC and don’t have plans, Lalami is in conversation with Rumaan Alam tonight at The Center for Fiction. Previous installments of Art & Kinship feature Emily Raboteau, Garrard Conley and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.

Links and updates, and a little about the new name of this newsletter—Meditations on Kinship—are coming soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll be be as gentle with yourself as you can.