Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking) ~Janet Brown

Girlie is “a 24-karat hottie” who works in America’s capitol of sleaze, Las Vegas. In her workplace, she is “by any conceivable metric, one of the very best.”  Like the majority of her co-workers, she’s Filipina, in an occupation where “none of the white people survived.” Girlie works for one of the world’s leading social media sites as a content moderator. For eight hours a day, five days a week, she watches a screen, viewing and removing the posts that are unspeakably and horribly obscene, before they can go online. Girlie is known as a Subject Matter Specialist whose expertise lies in ferreting out child sex abuse online, with a success rate of 99.5 %.

This seems as if it’s leading into the sort of dark and cruel satire that was popular in the 1970’s. Girlie is the sort of character who could easily become the 21st Century version of Candy by Terry Southern. For the first thirty pages of Moderation, Elaine Castillo presents her in a merciless light that threatens to make this novel nobody’s idea of a good time. Nevertheless, the smart and scathing observations that leap out of nowhere are enough of a reason to keep reading--and then they come from the sharp and sardonic brain of Girlie. 

Girlie Delmundo is not her real name. It’s a pseudonym she chose when she began to work as a content moderator, a job she took when her mother went broke flipping houses in the red-hot real estate market that preceded the crash of 2008. Since then Girlie has paid off her mother’s sizable debt to the IRS and has bought her parent a Tesla. She’s the mainstay of her two-family household that lives together in a “copy-paste Spanish-tiled dreamer’s monstrosity” in a gated community. She’s a graduate of Berkeley, a classicist with a penchant for medieval French. 

When she’s given a promotion that will take her from the dregs of social media to the world of virtual reality, Girlie isn’t intimidated by the man who offers it to her. She recognizes him, a Chinese man in a well-cut suit who speaks with “careful…faintly Hong Kong- inflected British English.” William has the “British talent of making a thank you sound like a death wish” but Girlie knows how to counter that “in her affable little killer’s voice.”

Moderation specializes in twists of a kaleidoscope. What begins as a satirical examination of social media and social aspirations becomes an examination of the world of virtual reality and the international players who are parlaying that into unbelievable fortunes. Tinges of romance flare up in the verbal duels that Girlie and William are fond of, reminiscent of the sophisticated badinage of movies from the 1930’s, carrying a degree of sexual tension that moves on to some rather steamy fantasies. An undertone of a thriller emerges with the disclosure of a convenient death and political scandals appear in a flurry of headlines near the novel’s end. 

Elaine Castillo blends all of these elements together in a brilliant pastiche that often seems to give nods to writers who have recently preceded her. While this book has been compared to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, there are portions that bring to mind Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Asia by the Book, May 2022). Still even with these little pieces of homage to fellow-authors, Elaine Castillo has written a highly original and wildly entertaining novel that’s the perfect book for summer’s end.