My Summer with the Dursleys

Like a calculable percentage of the public, I am somewhere in the middle of Harry Potter: Beyond Thunderdome, the penultimate tome in the convoluted wizard soap opera that now totals 3341 pages in hardback edition. To no one's surprise, book six begins at the end of yet another summer, with Harry waiting for some chimerical hovercraft to take him away from his aunt and uncle's house, and back to Hogwarts for another year at school. The Dursleys' home, as you're all aware, is a prison of stifling middlebrow values, peopled by guardians who detest their adolescent charge and endeavor to prevent owls from delivering his mail, just because they can.

It is inferred that Harry spends each summer at the Dursleys brooding and tormenting his witless cousin Dudley with wizarding parlor tricks, but generally the author chooses to skip over Harry's summers in favor of long winded dissertations on the family tree of unconvincing villains such as He Who Is Actually Boring And Not At All Scary, a choice that disappoints me greatly. You see, I argue that J.K. Rowling is missing a rich vein, one that would resonate loudly with her target audience: summer anomie in the 'burbs.

I'm seeing Harry in Ray Bans, driving way too fast in Mr. Dursley's station wagon, scaring Christ out of some townie Muggle babe. I'm seeing Harry with some of Dudley's friends from church camp, throwing up in the parking lot of Denny's after smoking his first menthol cigarette. Or: Harry, piercing his own ear with a tack and an ice cube, and making a mixed tape for Hermione that includes The Boy With the Thorn in His Side. I ask you to find me one reader out there who doesn't want to see a teenage wizard trashed on Mason jar liquor cabinet mixture, semiconscious under the swing set at that park on Privet Drive, muttering spells.

Right, you can't. Because there isn't one.

I spent my life until the age of 18 on Privet Drive, more or less, waiting for airborne transport to an alternate reality in which angry, big-haired teenage girls in Levis three sizes too large were taken Very Seriously by sensitive artistic males and basically, everyone else. Instead I had to make do with the unassuming economy cars my friends had borrowed from their parents, cars destined for parties in shabby 100-unit apartment complexes off the freeway, populated by drunken Pizza Hut employees blasting Welcome to the Jungle and talking about their plans to join the Marines.

How would Harry have dealt with this? Would he have glowered in the corner, willfully sober, trying to talk his ostensibly Christian girl friends out of unsavory back room encounters with delivery drivers named Dickie? Or would he have been the first one in line at the keg? (Are you sharing my vision of My Summer with the Dursleys on the big screen, with Seann William Scott as Dickie, and Vince Vaughn somehow worked in as the aging Pizza Hut franchise manager who scored the pot?)

Thanks to J.K. Rowling's disinterest in Harry's summer antics on Privet Drive, we will never know how this kind of muggle conundrum would test his mettle (although I am sure if I read Hello! magazine more often, I could see Prince Harry, another surly British lad of privilege, getting into just these sorts of scrapes). I encourage Ms. Rowling to rethink this omission in time for book 7.