But The Minority Report, with its snappy gumshoe dialogue, is told from the perspective of the police. Lalami, instead, sends us down the psychological rabbit hole of what it means to be incarcerated without due process — in a world where your fate is decided by algorithms.
The narrative is propulsive, but what makes the novel so absorbing are the ways the author makes this near-future world come to life. Much of the story is presented as an omniscient third-person narrative. But, in between, Lalami inserts fragments of emails, corporate reports, and bits of a procedural manual — all of which give insight into the systems that keep people like Sara indefinitely detained.
Ultimately, it is Sara who is the beating heart of this remarkable story. And Lalami gives us a character that isn’t simply an archetype, but a real human being full of ambition and ambivalence. Sara is a scholar of postcolonial African history who works at the Getty Museum. She is also a woman who dwells on her insecurities and on petty annoyances — like the mundane squabbles she has with her husband. Occasionally, she is betrayed by her own irritability.
The novel credibly conveys her harrowing sense of disorientation as the wide world she once inhabited is reduced to a cell. Sara’s most relatable trait is the struggle she faces trying to contain the rage that she feels over her situation — rage that, if expressed, will only worsen her circumstances. As the narrator tells us: “… compliance begins in the body. The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference.”
It’s a condition that isn’t specific to her incarceration. As a woman of color — Sara is of Moroccan descent — she is not the kind of person who is generally afforded the benefit of expressing anger. To inhabit Sara’s story is to hear the echoes of real people who are held in private immigration detention centers — who have no legal recourse and no timeline for when they might get released.
