After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of ‘the planet’s 30 most exciting young people’, alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States.
In Moderation, thirtysomething Filipina-American Girlie Delmundo (not her real name) works as a content moderator, removing the most hideous material to be found on the internet. The author doesn’t pull her punches. In an early scene, Girlie has to moderate a video of child sexual abuse as part of her final assessment to get the job. (Another candidate passes his assessment, even though he throws up during it because, crucially, he doesn’t pause the video.) She is asked to explain how she knows it is a young girl in the footage and not a consenting adult. The details are hard to stomach.
Castillo has said that her two main characters (one of whom is Girlie) don’t realise they are in a ‘Jane Austen-style Regency romance’. In fairness, I’m not sure I clocked this either, at least in the first half, when a love story is barely mentioned and the pages are so muddy it is genuinely hard to persevere. In the second half, however, when Girlie starts to fall for an English co-worker, a sort of fluency develops.
Good at her job, Girlie is offered a large pay raise by her company to moderate virtual reality theme parks. The frequency of rape in these environments becomes horribly numbing, at least for the reader. We are led to understand that Girlie has long been desensitised. The reasons for this are hinted at when we learn that she ‘had known since she was seven what it looked like when she turned a man on’.
Castillo has important things to say about the internet, trauma and true connection, but it’s a shame that this novel wasn’t polished to make it clearer or more enjoyable to read.
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