Bay Area native Elaine Castillo made the Financial Times’ “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People,” and her debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews and more outlets. Her new book, out Aug. 5, is “Moderation.” Here, she takes the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book.
I keep saying “Moderation” is a novel about two people who are wrong about the genre the story of their lives is being told in: one thinks he’s in a corporate espionage revenge thriller about the collusion between the tech industry and the rise of the far right, the other thinks she’s in a gritty immigrant drama about content moderators and racialized labor in the post-2008 economic climate—and actually, they’re both in a Jane Austen-style romance.
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The novel’s main character is a content moderator, essentially one of the frontline workers of the Internet: she filters through the most harrowing extremes of violent content, every day, so that civilians like us don’t have to see that content in our Facebook feeds and Instagram grids. Then, one day, she’s offered a mysterious and lucrative position as an elite moderator, for a cutting-edge virtual reality landscape… and the rest of the book unfolds from there.
Ultimately, it’s a novel about labor, harm, and love as a practice of world-building, love as maybe the most sci-fi fantasy idea of all.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
Recently I’ve been recommended “War and Peace”—I know, I know, but if it makes you feel any better, I just finished the copy my dad and I bought when I was in high school, so take your time—but Tolstoy’s takedown of Napoleon and the whole Hegelian Great Man theory, his excoriating view of the dictatorial temperament, his capacious interest in the fullness and meaning of the world—I’ll paraphrase what Clifton Fadiman says in his beautiful intro to the Maude translation, which is that Tolstoy knows much, but it’s his love for what he knows that makes his knowledge live for us.
And something else in this novel that I hold to as well: that the battlefield, the politics, the history, the “war” of “War and Peace” is not separate from the salons, the ballrooms, the romances, the friendships, the domestic squabbles, the “peace” of “War and Peace.” A lesser writer would see genre hierarchies between these two sides—would be afraid of spending so much time on Helene Kuragina’s salons—but Tolstoy knows this binary is silly and false, and makes for a smaller mind, a poorer vision, an untrue world.
Q. What are you reading now?
Currently in the middle of reading Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” and loving it.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
I think it’s completely instinctual: in fact, I think while writers are often asked what they read before writing their latest novel (what their influences were going into it, that kind of thing) I think it would be better to ask writers what they read right after turning in their manuscript. Because for most of us, it’s the practice of writing itself that shows us what we were trying to do, the ideas we were circling around—we find out in the writing. It’s the books we’re instinctively drawn to afterwards that are often revelatory, because usually we’re subconsciously being drawn to things that might illuminate what we’ve just done, the world we’ve just come out of making.
And I think that’s especially true if you, like me, are the kind of person who chooses a book seemingly completely different from the book they’ve just written. With my first novel, about a bisexual Communist exile living in the Bay Area, the first book I read after turning in the manuscript was George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss,” which I thought would be totally different from the world I’d just written: rural England, siblings, class and coming of age in the 1800s, complete 180, right? Well, it turns out “The Mill on the Floss” is a Filipino family drama, as far as I was concerned. And I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t been mysteriously drawn to that book! So listening to your subconscious attractions is invaluable, as a reader.
Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?
The death of a particular horse in Émile Zola’s “Germinal,” which I re-read for the first time in 20 years. I originally read it in French at university, and sobbed then. This time I read it in English—because there are certain scenes that are omitted in some English translations, which I find politically telling, and was curious to know if this one would translate those scenes (it did)—and thought that scene wouldn’t hit me as hard. But I found myself sobbing all over again.
It’s one of my most beloved books, and yet I also think of it as a great cautionary failure: a book that’s also about the failure to integrate personal repair with collective repair, a book that’s also about how the failure to make our interpersonal relationships less fascist will prevent us from making a world that’s less fascist, a book that’s about what happens when love has no place in one’s revolutionary hopes. Reading “War and Peace” and “Germinal” side by side is illuminating in this regard.
Q. Do you have a favorite book or books?
Either of the two mentioned above (“War and Peace,” “Germinal”), but a new favorite has been “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.” I got into Tolkien for the first time last year, and completely fell in love with the universe, with his essays (have been recommending “On Fairy Stories” to everyone I know), and am beginning a campaign to convince people that Faramir, not Darcy, is the hottest man in English fiction.
Q. Which books are you planning to read next?
I want to finish “Empire of AI,” and then I’m looking forward to reading an early galley of my friend John Freeman’s “California Rewritten”; he’s such a brilliant, incisive and poetic reader, editor and writer, and truly one of the best Californian dog people I know (as a Californian dog person, this category is of paramount importance to me), and I can’t wait to dive into his take on Californian literature.
Q. Do you have a favorite character or quote from a book?
Right now, it’s Faramir in “The Two Towers”: “What in truth this Thing is I cannot yet guess; but some heirloom of power and peril it must be. A fell weapon, perchance, devised by the Dark Lord. If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein) might desire such a thing and be allured by it… But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo… For myself, I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings, and the Silver Crown return, and Minas Tirith in peace; Minas Anor again as of old, full of light, high and fair,”—and this is the part that really gets me!—“beautiful as a queen among other queens: not a mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves.”
I think what gets me is the fact that Faramir sees the liberation of his people, his city, only as a collective, shared liberation; that a liberation that comes at the cost of oppressing someone else is no liberation at all. Wise words for our day.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
My father was the person who gave me my first book, and turned me into a reader, and then into a writer. He was the only person I shared this love of reading with—no one else in my early life was a reader—and his loss was the loss of an entire shared world. But I glimpse that world again every time I read.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
I am a complete horror scaredy-cat—my friends know I’ve watched all of Kubrick’s films EXCEPT “The Shining,” all of Hitchcock EXCEPT “Psycho,” et cetera. I’ve been wanting to watch the film “Audition” for over 20 years and can’t bring myself to because I’m too scared. Now full on bloody, gory, violent fight scenes, like in Park Chan-wook films: totally fine with that. But a door creaking before a jumpscare? HARD NO.
That said, I read one of the most magnificent—and magnificently terrifying—books recently, Susan Barker’s “Old Soul,” which is just the most stunning exploration of time, immortality, harm, desire, evil. And while it fully terrified me, it also made me curious to maybe dip a toe back into the horror genre. A thrilling reading experience, which has creaked open (eek) a new door!
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
Maybe how much it owes to the spirit of a film I love, Akira Kurosawa’s “Red Beard,” on the long afterlife of curing and being cured — what it means, to be a doctor. The book mentions Kurosawa films, including “Red Beard” —though it would be a spoiler to say which Kurosawa film is William’s (secret) favorite, but I leave it to Kurosawa fans to guess! Another film I love (and in which I found resonances with “Moderation,” despite watching the film only after writing it) is Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff”; a wondrous films about what harm, repair, and justice actually look like over the course of a life, and what we do with power once it comes into our hands.