She Had, She Lost, She Whined: Mona at Sea

by James Freyland

Mona at Sea (2021), by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

In his 1967 critique of capitalism, Guy Debord notes, “All of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything…lived has moved away into a representation.” Written decades ago, Debord’s work may seem exclusive to a place and time much different from our own. However, capitalism has flourished in the U.S. since Debord’s time. Capitalism has infused our belief system with the myth of the American Dream, an accumulation of the spectacles as Debord identifies. For a while, this dream could become a reality, for even the most disadvantaged could reach prosperity through hard work. Yet, a country once bursting with opportunity would eventually find its downfall in the Great Recession. A cleaver to the American Dream, the Great Recession turned success into a tale of pure luck as opposed to hard work. As a result, the ones most impacted by the falsity of the modern American Dream are millennials who were indoctrinated into this myth while young. They grew up and went into the real world expecting everything, only to discover that their dreams were ultimately just that – dreams. Disillusioned, millennials in 2008 faced the chaos of a country that promised everything, but could ultimately guarantee nothing. What then were they to do? Despair? Cry? What can they do when a reality so carefully crafted reveals itself to be a mere illusion?

In her debut novel Mona at Sea, Elizabeth Gonzalez James attempts to unravel these questions and analyze this precise situation. The novel centers on Mona Lisa Mireles, a millennial so dedicated to being great that even her name is, “…a half-cocked bid to align…with greatness.” Having done everything right according to American mythos, it should not come as a surprise that Mona was on the cusp of receiving her dues – a prestigious junior analyst position at Bannerman, an investment bank. Arriving in NYC from Tucson for the first day of her achievement, Mona is cruelly brought down to earth with the advent of the Great Recession and the realization that she no longer has a job. Returning to the suburbs, Mona feels like a failure and becomes the embodiment of the “sad millennial.” 

Mona may initially seem put together before her fall yet, just like the American Dream she so values, rot hides beneath her beautiful disguise. Through the increasing details provided regarding her upbringing and the cut marks on her thighs, we see a problem that has been ongoing for years, predating the supposed loss of her future. We realize that Mona has never truly had it together. As James writes, “Obsessive accrual of accomplishments masked a sad young woman who didn’t know who she was” (emphasis added). It turns out that success has become the only thing to define Mona, resulting in a reality where she could think about loss, “…but to see it or live it—that wouldn’t compute.” Mona must then decide between holding onto a past of forced and false accomplishments, or continuing forward onto a path of failure and indecisivity.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James does an adept job at capturing Mona’s millennial ennui. However, at times her character and plot development are inconsistent in the novel, specifically when writing about the angst and situation Mona finds herself in after losing her job, which ultimately becomes a bit unbearable to read in longer format (a problem that might have to do with her experience with only ever writing short stories and essays in the past). It is incredibly frustrating when the author is disparaging towards millennials as being entitled, condescendingly telling them to “stop being a victim,” when they are merely the inheritors of a system broken by their parents who refuse to take blame for at least a part of their children’s false expectations and misery. Yes, characters like Mona expected the world because of their hard work, but only because their parents raised them to believe that the world owed them anything at all. It is also frustrating that James makes Mona a brilliant character, capable of figuring out what makes herself miserable, only to consistently repeat these same toxic behaviors and desires. This self-destructive cycle is most evident in Mona’s relationship with the financial sector: she acknowledges its role in the crisis she is embroiled in, yet she can not help but, “…want to work for the very robber barons who’d sell their own mothers for a Chateau Lafitte and a foursome at Augusta.” As a character whose proudest achievement is a Mona Lisa carved into her thigh, Mona would never settle for a job where one creates absolutely nothing. These discrepancies between her character’s desires and what she feels she should do makes it hard to sympathize with Mona. She knows what would bring her happiness, but merely prefers to whine about the injustice of her situation.

James also struggles in making Mona more than just the “naive” trope portrayed in the novel. Choice after toxic choice, we see Mona acknowledging the wrongness of putting her American Dream before her dignity and relationships. Still, time and time again, she is willing to sell-out in order to pursue her dream job. Stemming from the unfounded notion that, “great job begets great person,” Mona is so desperate to prove her worth that she is willing to treat herself and others around her as dispensable and unworthy. This is most apparent when Mona finally lands an interview for an investment firm in Tucson. What should have been an opportunity for Mona to show her potential and skill in her desired field devolves into a self-deprecation show in which she attempts to convince the man interviewing her, “…to hire [her] if only to chase the fantasy [they] could one day screw.” Mona sits through the interviewer’s blatant misogyny (being told finance, “…isn’t a business for egghead girls,” and racism, “…if you wanted to…you could pass for all-white”) all in a desperate attempt to prove she is a deserving person. Mona acknowledges she loathes herself, “…for this and loathe him the same for putting [her] in this impossible spot,” yet she does nothing to change the status quo and consents to his ignorance by laughing it off. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. When Ashley, Mona’s best friend, is fortunate to land her own dream job, despite not doing as well as Mona in school, Mona feels nothing but pure rage and jealousy noting, “…[I was] supposed to be happy for her, but it takes all my acting skills to force my mouth up into a smile.” She treats friendship, a state of mutual trust and support between people, and turns it into a competition existing solely to reaffirm Mona’s self-worth by relying on Ashley to, “…fare worse than [her], that [she] would always win in comparison.” 

Though Mona no longer draws her self-worth from achievement in a capitalistic society at the end of the novel, she does make the mistake of exchanging one myth, the American Dream, for another – love fixes all wrongs. It is a mistake often made as she now begins to draw her self-worth from the love she receives from her first-ever boyfriend, Duncan. In replacing one myth with another, we see the constraints of the time period in which James wrote the novel. Writing during the Great Recession, James produced a rough draft three years later in 2011, only to shelve the book for ten years before finally publishing it in 2021. With a whole ten years between start to finish, James had a unique opportunity to transcend the millennial trope prevalent in literature and allow Mona’s character to grow with the millennial society that simultaneously waded this precise crisis. However, James merely offers us another stale story of Great Recession-based millennial disillusionment. By dismissing Mona’s self-cutting as “artistic expression” and stating it is cured by her newfound relationship, and creating a partner who exploits her cutting to progress his photography career, James not only disrespects Mona’s self-worth but also blatantly ignores later social developments championed by millennials, such as the #MeToo movement and growing conversations regarding mental health. Both James and Mona come close to transcending expectations, but they still ultimately fall short in radically changing the nature of their plights, whether in writing a book aptly describing the millennial experience or finding self-worth, respectively. 

Interestingly enough, in a way unique to the finance nerd she is at heart, Mona is weirdly able to move us at the end of the novel with a discussion on the economic term of “the sunk cost fallacy.” Mona explains it as a finance rule in which, “…you shouldn’t throw good money after bad…no matter how much you invested in something, no matter if you spent ten years developing a technology or blew through millions of dollars, if it’s not working you just have to walk away. You’re never going to spend enough to make it successful. Just eat the loss and move on.” James is finally able to provide a mantra for the “sad millennials,” one that promises absolutely nothing but a chance to find true happiness. Far from just being a millennial mantra, something about this fallacy rings true with the state of the American Dream. Rather than relying on “guaranteed” paths to success, we should focus on being true to ourselves, whether in our quests for money, happiness, or love. Mona never truly reaches this point, but perhaps that is the novel’s point. Bombarded by expectations and myth, society expects millenials to have the answers for issues pervasive throughout time. However, we often forget that life is about growth, and millennials still have time to perfect, err, mend, and learn. Having faced disillusionment with the American Dream, millennials offer us a path forward to prevent future generations’ societal disillusionment, focusing on one’s own dreams rather than a mass-marketed societal expectation.  After all, what is a dream if not an opportunity to be better than we are?