Anyone who recalls Steven Spielberg’s 2002 thriller, Minority Report --- a tale of individuals apprehended in anticipation of crimes they’re expected to commit --- won’t fail to note echoes of that story in THE DREAM HOTEL. Building on that premise, Laila Lalami’s latest novel is a chilling yet simultaneously deeply humane portrait of our casual willingness to cede more of our privacy to commercial enterprises ravenous for intimate details of our lives in exchange for a promise of comfort and convenience that often proves illusory at best.

Set in an indeterminate near future, THE DREAM HOTEL tells the story of Sara Tilila Hussein, the married daughter of Moroccan immigrants and the mother of 13-month-old twins, who lives with her family in Los Angeles and works as an archivist at the Getty Museum. After attending a conference in London, Sara lands at LAX a few days before Christmas. But instead of an anticipated quick reunion with her family, she is questioned in an increasingly intrusive and unsettling fashion by representatives of an entity called the Risk Assessment Administration. Their interrogation culminates in her transport to a Short-Term Forensic Observation Facility in a dusty small town in rural San Bernardino County for a 21-day period of observation.

"...a chilling yet simultaneously deeply humane portrait of our casual willingness to cede more of our privacy to commercial enterprises ravenous for intimate details of our lives in exchange for a promise of comfort and convenience that often proves illusory at best."

Has Sara committed a crime, or is she even a suspect in one? No. Rather, she’s been relegated to this “retention center” along with some 100 other women because a “crime-prediction algorithm” that considers 200 data sources and is part of a “bias-free, science-based crime prevention system” has determined that she’s at high risk of perpetrating violence against her husband, Elias.

This menacing “new era of digital policing” was born as a result of a federal statute enacted in the wake of a mass shooting 20 years earlier at the Super Bowl. Most damning of all to Sara is information gleaned from her dreams, recorded on a “neuroprosthetic” device called the Dreamsaver, which she originally decided to have implanted based on its promise to help her troubled sleep.

Evoking comparisons to both Kafka and Orwell, and with an efficient, understated style, Lalami methodically exposes the features of a world that is instantly recognizable as our own but has been altered in fundamental and frightening ways. As the novel opens, Sara’s initial confinement has stretched to more than nine months, almost certainly costing her her job and placing enormous strain on a marriage that was comfortable but faced its share of normal stresses, exacerbated by new parenthood. Her efforts to understand why her repeated attempts to return to her previous life are rebuffed on constantly shifting grounds only ensnare her more deeply in the system’s labyrinthine structure of rules and their opaque logic.

Haunted by her dreams, including ones provoked by the death of her younger brother in childhood, Sara diligently records her interpretations in a journal, as she struggles to penetrate to the heart of a process that seems designed to drive her toward madness: “Being surveilled all the time, even in her sleep, had made her unsure what to believe about herself; she no longer knows how to separate her emotions from the expectations that others have about them,” Lalami writes.

In addition to Sara, Lalami introduces a handful of other detainees, none of whom seem especially dangerous --- or, for that matter, even threatening. Some are released inexplicably, while others languish for periods even longer than Sara’s. They’re either forced to labor at ordinary tasks necessary to keep the facility functioning or enlisted in projects to aid the business of Safe-X, the private contractor responsible for its operation. Seemingly minor transgressions result in reports that raise one’s “risk score” and postpone any chance at release.

It’s only when Sara lands upon a simple but undeniably effective method of throwing sand in the gears of the system that has endeavored to strip her of all that makes her human that THE DREAM HOTEL summons a glimmer of hope for a future that may be at best dimly visible, but not beyond her (and our) reach. Her response is a homage to the indomitability of the human spirit and a tribute to the universal yearning for freedom and the right to live one’s life free from unwanted intrusion.

Lalami depicts her imagined world with a light touch, nudging the reader to reflect on how uncomfortably close OmniCloud, a massive data-gathering operation that is “always hungry; it can only function by feeding itself continually,” is to our current reality. Homes, including Sara’s, feature an Alexa-like app called Nimble that does everything from confirming that bills are paid to scheduling car service to suggesting dinner party menus based on guests’ eating habits and the food that’s available in the host’s refrigerator. Like the Greek god Janus, the dual-faced nature of modern technology clearly emerges.

Among the sources Lalami cites in her acknowledgments is Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff’s THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM. It’s not a leap, probably not even a giant step, from the world Zuboff describes to the one Lalami so effectively and frighteningly imagines. She suggests that whether we ultimately find ourselves fully enmeshed in the most problematic aspects of that existence will be determined, at least in part, by the choices each of us makes today.