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Elaine Castillo’s second novel is set within the rotten heart of the US tech industry, where “Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.” What makes her so effective in her underpaid contract role moderating content for social media giant Reeden is that most prized of workplace currencies: a stoical capacity for labour. Though the job’s mental toll is clear – suicides are common, white staff never stick around and wellness support remains superficial – Girlie proves exceptionally hardy, near-perfect in her ability to identify and scrape feeds free of child sexual abuse content. Behind her productive impassivity, Castillo tells us with a sombre touch of irony, is a “glowing” line of ancestors – Filipina nurses and maids who have long cleaned up after others.
Things look up for Girlie once William Cheung enters the scene, inviting her to become a moderator at Playground, a virtual reality entertainment platform newly acquired by Reeden. Girlie is a perfect fit. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, she carries a cloying sense of filial indebtedness (“there was an unspoken understanding, an ironclad cultural code: if you made money, you had to pay your family back”). With the family home under mortgage, the generous benefits package is hard to resist. And, because we’re partly also in romance territory, so is the man offering it.
Castillo’s celebrated debut, America is Not the Heart, was centred on the Filipino experience in 90s America. Peopled with nurses, doctors, faith healers, makeup artists, restaurateurs and DJs shifting languages between Ilocano, Tagalog and Pangasinan, the book opened a window on to a shadowed corner of American life, but refused to trade on trauma (“the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic”, Castillo calls it in her essay collection, How To Read Now). Instead, it honoured quiet, quotidian expressions of community and survival. But where that first novel could lean into self-seriousness, weighed down by the familiar solemnities of the immigrant story, Moderation has more fun within the genre – even if of a masochistic kind (“Parents worked all the time … Never been on vacation with my family,” Girlie says at one point. “Never been to Disneyland either”).
The book’s twinned look at labour and immigration all but guarantees comparisons to Ling Ma’s 2018 novel, Severance. But Girlie, unlike the Chinese-born protagonist of the latter work, is not haunted by memories of a distant homeland; her only longing is for her childhood home in Milpitas, lost in the 2008 market crash. The books’ true kinship may lie in the fact that they both unfold against a backdrop of collapse: where Ma imagined a fungal pandemic, Castillo envisions a looming digital end time.
Playground’s journey, Girlie learns, began with a keen interest in the therapeutic space. The need for funding then led it to merge with L’Olifant, a French theme park company showcasing “French history to the French”. Now, with Reeden as a shared parent, the two are poised to transform the worlds of entertainment and healthcare – at least in theory.
Castillo cannily frames VR’s healing power – from treating PTSD and phobias to providing pain relief and easing suicidal thoughts – within a darker tale of its co-option for profit, control and surveillance. Castillo is interested in the overlap between rightwing politics, tech culture and historiography. L’Olifant is modelled after historical French theme park company Puy du Fou, created by Philippe de Villiers, who is known for his Catholic, Eurosceptic and national sovereignty politics, and, in 2022, for backing the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. Like Puy du Fou, L’Olifant is on a mission to make history “fun” and “exciting”, even if it means ideologically rewriting it.
As the story unfolds, and therapeutic ideals, revisionist ambitions and corporate greed converge, Castillo has potent themes to work with: censorship, digital feudalism, the exploitation of biometric data for propaganda purposes, and the disturbing trade-off between principle and progress. Disappointingly, she seems more content to skim surfaces than probe depths. Her narratorial tactic of choice is to tell and tell – through flat expositional dialogue, but also the lazy shorthand of news headlines (“PLAYGROUND’S NEW VIRTUAL REALITY INITIATIVE: FAR-OUT FANTASY OR FAR-RIGHT NIGHTMARE?”) – never showing, never dramatising. The characters, as a result, can feel like bystanders, idling on the tale’s margins rather than actively inhabiting its centre. Girlie and William are interesting in their own right, but together, not exactly a match you’d ship. This is because for pages on end, the supposed romance between the pair lies dormant, only for it to comically whip into life in sudden bursts of passion. The novel tries to straddle too many worlds at once – thriller, dystopia, second-generation immigrant account, love story – but commits wholeheartedly to none. The result is a narrative that feels more scattered than layered.
But Moderation is not without merits. Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right. As a novel of ideas, Moderation contains terror enough to keep you reading, and looking for signs of the nightmare its author has taken the time to document.
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