MODERATION, by Elaine Castillo

There are entire Reddit threads devoted to dissecting the grim mechanics of online content moderation. The job is like “pumping raw sewage into your brain for minimum wage,” one user says; another warns, “Do not ever work as a moderator unless you fancy having PTSD.” Veterans of the profession report having been sealed inside a psychological bathysphere, pressurized and isolating, so they could descend into the internet’s abyss.

Elaine Castillo’s new novel, “Moderation,” plunges us into this unsettling terrain through the perspective of Girlie Delmundo, a quick-witted, 30-something Filipina American contractor for a social media conglomerate called Reeden. After 10 years of screening gore and child sexual abuse in the company’s Las Vegas branch, she’s developed a surgical skill for compartmentalizing and an accuracy rate of “around 99.5 percent.”

In an industry that expects emotional burnout after a year or two, Girlie is an accidental lifer, a tenured ghost in the machine. She chose Girlie as her corporate pseudonym (Reeden encourages fake names for employee — and company — protection) because “it seemed like the most obvious confirmed-bachelor Pinay auntie name she could think of.”

For her troubles, Girlie earns shockingly little pay, and no benefits; and when she’s promoted to work at Playground, Reeden’s newly acquired V.R. company, she calls her new salary “pay off the mortgage in full better.” Castillo teasingly withholds the actual sum, while Girlie’s initial take-home salary of $28,000 lodges in the mind like a bad pixel.

“Moderation” is sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic. Girlie supports not just herself but her extended family of “nurses and maids and cleaners”: her mother, who was left “a million dollars in debt” after the 2008 housing crash, as well as aunts and cousins who sustain a shared mortgage in a gated Vegas subdivision featuring manicured lawns, a golf course and a water park.

Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” was a family saga set partly in 1990s California and haunted by the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and its brutal suppression of leftist resistance. “Moderation” is no less ambitious, training an unsparing eye on Girlie’s life in a seven-income household that operates like a tightknit timeshare. Especially evocative is Girlie’s bond with Maribel, her exuberant, relentlessly chatty younger cousin — equal parts confidante, ward and comic foil — whose upcoming wedding becomes a focal point for the family’s bickering and lavish displays of loyalty.

Castillo’s close third-person narration, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that detonate like precision-guided bombs. A manager is skewered for “shamelessly deploying the material fact of his brownness to obscure the equally material fact of his bossness.” Girlie explains her reluctance to procreate with memorable bite: “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.” At a party, a Londoner is miffed “that another English person was there, as if it diminished the commodity value of her accent.”

Castillo favors long sentences that twist and kink like a delirious garden hose, delighted by the unruly spillage of thought. Some metaphors snarl into confusion (“she refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner”; “new housing was being thrown up against the scrubland like a rash”), but this is the risk of a style that prizes a hummingbird metabolism over polish.

A logline for the book might have read: “Pride and Prejudice” for the age of platform capitalism. Girlie’s boss, William, offhandedly asks if she’s ever imagined herself as the heroine of a film — Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps. Their mutual attraction is apparent from the start, and while she remains skeptical of Playground’s vaunted promises of “therapeutic benefits,” Girlie finds it hard to resist William’s “angel of history smile” and the “tractor beam pull” of his gaze. She in turn impresses the British entrepreneur with her impudence and seeming desire to talk herself out of a job (on their first date she dismisses V.R. as “old news” and “clunky tech”). Thesis meeting antithesis remains as potent a formula as ever for creating chemistry.

Structurally, the combining of incisive tech critique with a fairly predictable romance plot presents a more challenging proposition: how to reconcile the content moderator’s necessarily paranoid reading of the world (Girlie’s “rule of thumb”: “If anyone remotely femme was in the room, someone was going to find a creative way to assault her”) with the optimism required to fall in love? By the end that tension is not so much resolved as it is conveniently disappeared.

“Moderation” succeeds in rendering visible the often invisible dirty work of the digital era. As disturbing as that work may be, it’s even more so to imagine our own future now that Meta has ended its third-party fact-checking program and YouTube relaxed its moderation rules. That we are not yet buried beneath a Big Tech rubble owes everything to the Girlies of the world.

MODERATION | By Elaine Castillo | Viking | 310 pp. | $29