A Special Relativity is the story of a family living in Orange County, California. The novella takes place during one summer. Vanden Westbeautiful and cruelhas just returned home from college on the East Coast to find that her new family in California is entirely different from the one she left behind. Her widowed mother, Lori West, has remarried Americorp CEO and multi-millionaire Howard Moore, whose stepdaughter Elizabeth Moore is Vandens new stepsister. Vandens mother and her new husband are rarely in the country, leaving Vanden and Elizabeth mostly unsupervised in an environment ridden with temptation. The girls zigzag through Southern California with Vandens wild friends, experimenting with drugs, recklessness, and a blasé attitude toward sex. Surrounded by adults who seem alarmingly lifeless and filled with a frightening apathy toward their environment Vanden and her friends seek out anything that will make them feel alive. Immersed in a world of dizzying wealth and a fanatical obsession with beauty, Elizabeth is transformed from modest, inconspicuous, and well-behaved, to thrill-seeking, spontaneous, and apathetic. Meanwhile, a tragic act of neglect leaves the child in Vandens care dead. Beneath the glittering surface of the West familys lavish lifestyle and behind the barriers this guarded family has erected for themselves, Vanden learns that there is more to her new family than meets the eyeincluding a long-buried secret involving her deceased father. Ultimately, in this world of uniformly blue skies, all becomes relative: truth, morality, self.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-04122010-153329 |
| Date | 28 April 2010 |
| Creators | Sullivan, Valerie |
| Contributors | Peter Guralnick, Tony Earley, Nancy Reisman |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu//available/etd-04122010-153329/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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