Choose your own analysis: Is "Didi" by Amber Caron dull or terribly clever?

Depending on how you read "Didi" by Amber Caron, it might be a dull feminist morality tale that leans too heavily on the cultural and political tropes of recent feminism at the expense of character development, OR it might be a very clever commentary on how people can fail those around them when they lean too heavily on theories about the world to understand people who need help rather than observing the people themselves, OR it might be a no-fault story about how scary it is that the situation can change so quickly when caring for a child. As Val yells at Evan at one point in the story: "We have three options!" 

The first five and half lines above were all one sentence. Korean might be having an effect on my English prose. Let me explain in shorter sentences. 

Synopsis

Didi is a teenage girl in trouble who goes to stay with narrator Aunt Val and her husband Evan for a month one summer. Didi's father thinks their boring life in Westport, CT might be the antidote to the trouble Didi's getting herself in, sneaking out and wearing suggestive clothing that seems to suggest she's gotten promiscuous. Since Val used to do similar stuff when she was Didi's age, the father perhaps thinks she might be able to relate. For a while, things seem okay to Aunt Val and Evan, although Didi seems a little calculating, a little manipulative. Still, they seem to be having a good time together until Didi disappears one night. Didi's father leaves their home in East Texas to come to his sister Val's, and they wait. Didi eventually returns without explanations. Based on the details from the narrator, I see three basic ways of interpreting this story: 

Reading One

1) Didi is a troubled child because she falls victim to some of the pathologies recent feminism has highlighted that our culture creates specifically in young women. One point of emphasis in recent feminism has been to show how young women are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to not occupy more space than is strictly necessary. It teaches them to be small, both in physical and auditory volume. Here, let me Google it for you...the first three hits that seem to me to more or less explain this belief are here, here, and here. This causes women to censure their actions, their words, and their thoughts, to be calculating about everything, and to worry constantly about how they are perceived. 

The first thing Aunt Val notices about Didi is how fully she is falling into this trap. 

The first thing I notice is that Didi is small, makes herself even smaller by curling up on a single couch cushion. She crosses her arms even when standing in large rooms. Tucks her legs under her body when she sits at the kitchen table, pushes her silverware under the lip of her dinner plate to take up even less space. Everything about her is scrunched, compact. 

So there it is, a pretty overt link between a character's issues and well-worn feminist theory. It gets returned to a few times in the story, showing us how little Didi eats (so she will be as small as possible), how she doesn't move at night while sleeping, how she even sleeps on top of the covers. At the end of the story, Aunt Val, who maybe understands Didi's underlying psychology better than the others because it was also her psychology, takes action to try and arrest Didi's habit for making herself small: "So I do the only thing I can. I pull her hands out of her pockets. I push her shoulders back. I am not gentle." Sort of a Marine Corps solution: quit slouching and get your hands out of your pockets. 

In this reading, narrator Aunt Val has correctly diagnosed Didi's ailment, and her final act in the story is the first act in Didi's healing process. Women, go ahead and take up space, this story is saying. 

To me, this is the most boring possible reading. While I think there's a lot of validity to the point raised by feminism about how women are taught to make themselves small, I also don't think there's a simple link between that tendency and the particular bad behaviors of struggling young women. You can't Marine Corps this shit and tell people to stand up straight and fix them. That hope kind of reminds me of the scene in Parenthood, where Grandma comes in and tells Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen a story about life's ups and downs, and just when the audience thinks this is the wisdom the two characters needed, Steve Martin shows the audience how wrong they were to expect such an easy solution to real problems to come from Grandma's story: "You know, a minute ago, I was really confused about life, and then Grandma came in with her wonderful and affecting roller coaster story, and now everything's GREAT again!"  

So reading one, which is a straightforward diagnosis of a problem and a solution from a more or less reliable narrator, doesn't interest me much.

Reading Two

2. The narrator's own misreading causes her to apply the wrong solution, or to misdiagnose the problem. The narrator is very quick to read a popular feminist interpretation of the problems of young people into Didi, but how closely is she really paying attention? She does, after all, miss a lot of clues that Didi was about to bolt right before she disappeared. And Evan, although he doesn't see everything, is the one who picks up on how she walks around with "mirrors" around her, like she's evaluating herself all the time and being extremely calculating and even manipulative. Aunt Val didn't see it. 

Val has a job studying shrimp. Part of this job involves cutting out the eyes of the shrimp in order to study their unique vision. Val confesses to being something of a voyeur. She's clearly obsessed with vision, with being able to observe. But she's willing to cut the eyes out of the shrimp to get at their secrets. She doesn't love the thing she studies. She only loves the power of being able to observe. Val doesn't even realize how twisted this is, because when Didi asks if the shrimp feel pain from her experiments, Val can only prevaricate and say that they're "getting better at controlling for that." 

Val also mostly pushes aside her realization of how the life choices she's forced on Evan have made him mostly unhappy. He's had to follow her around and to take whatever work he could find, because the couple was prioritizing Val's career. Val knows this, but manages to keep it mostly out of her line of vision, because it's uncomfortable for her. She'll observe anything, as long as it's what she wants to see. 

Val thinks she's a great observer, but she actually sucks at it. She replaces her theories based on whatever feminism she's read for actual observation. In so doing, she harms the person she's trying to keep an eye on. 

This is the most interesting possible reading to me. One kind of intriguing result of reading the story in this way is what it does to a direct address to the reader the narrator does at the end of the story. After Didi reappears, the narrator, speaking both to and for the reader, asks a series of questions: "And what is it you want to know? Whether my brother hits her?...Whether she is crying?...Or do you want to know where she was, what she was doing?" I didn't really want to know any of these things, but in this second reading, this series of questions can become a kind of projection onto the reader of the narrator's own failure to observe faithfully. She is criticizing the reader for being unable to interpret what happened because she can't bring herself to blame her own lack of observation. 

Reading Three

3. There really isn't anyone at fault here. Parenting is hard. Val once observed an overworked mother who accidentally locked herself out of her home while her toddlers were inside. It went from being a situation she had under control to an emergency in the blink of an eye. Maybe that's what parenting is, mostly. 

One of my favorite short stories ever, "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken, covers similar thematic terrain. That's also a story of parents who try a summer change of scenery to reset their daughter's troubling behavior. They also think it's working until they find out how terribly wrong they have been. 

"Didi" isn't as instantly and obviously a story about parenting I'll love as "Thunderstruck." I felt like with "Thunderstruck," I immediately felt it was a story that explained why parenting is so terrifying. "Didi" is a little harder to immediately file away as a story that revealed the truth about kids or teens or people who make bad life choices. But it is a story that rewards a second reading and a little further consideration.