Moderation by Elaine Castillo: Sharp-edged literary rom-com
Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a gritty and thought-provoking literary near-future tech drama and sharp-edged romcom. Read my full review.
Moderation Publisher Synopsis
Girlie, a thirty-something Filipinx-American, works a day job at a social-media moderation centre, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s good at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to cauterise all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big pay rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, stunning simulations of civilizations long-since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and it almost seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the ambient racism and misogyny of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing… Girlie’s type.
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My Review
It would be easy to read Moderation‘s synopsis and gloss over the early trigger warnings that are there in plain sight. I saw them and was ready for ‘rip-the-bandaid-off’ grittiness. But even so, I still found Castillo’s matter-of-fact depiction of the job of a social media content moderator confronting.
What exacerbates the impact on readers, I think, is the recklessly raw and fatalistic inner-most thoughts of this novel’s enigmatic narrator, coupled with Castillo’s at times complex prose and multi-stream sentencing. This narrative is heavy on barbed social and cultural commentary too.
“You’re not getting younger,” Flo said. “Especially for kids.” Girlie didn’t know if this was the venue in which to tell her mother she had absolutely zero plans to subject a new human soul to the vinegar-dipped calamity of this family: financial illiteracy, parentification, brushing systemic abuse under the rug, short calves?
Suffice to say, the first half of Moderation is full on and not always pleasant, not at all what you’d expect from a romcom. So I fully expect this to be a ‘DNF’ for some. But like a car crash in slow motion, in its own very dark humoured way it was a beguiling challenge. Plus, in respect to William, Girlie’s match in terms of scarred soul and self-moderated exterior, there was potential for light on the horizon, so I persisted and am very glad that I did.
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“If one was the type of person—the only sensible type of person, in Girlie’s view—who separated out with martial discipline the distinct, incoherent parts of one’s life, so that work colleagues never had to meet family members, and family members only rarely had to meet friends, and childhood friends rarely had to meet adulthood friends, and so on, and so forth—any unexpected collision of those parts was the stuff of unmitigated disaster, as with any clash of worlds.”
As is often the way in life, journeys through darkness can make the light when it does arrive feel all the more special — and so it was the case in Moderation when the romantic storyline gained traction.
Elaine Castillo’s exploration of ‘moderation’ in its myriad forms is brave, ambitious, clever and impactful, and the romantic storyline a hopeful strain for agents of change for the better. This an author not afraid to unpick scars so that her readership might collectively heal — and that is something I have great admire.
If you are seeking a light and cosy romcom, there are plenty of better options out there for you. But, if you enjoy being challenged by your reading, then Elaine Castillo’s highly original Moderation may be right up your alley.
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* My receiving an advanced ebook copy of Moderation for review purposes did not impact the expression of my honest opinions above.