{"id":82516,"date":"2015-02-09T16:56:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T21:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82516"},"modified":"2015-02-09T17:44:47","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T22:44:47","slug":"hot-stove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/09\/hot-stove\/","title":{"rendered":"Hot Stove"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Nelle_Harper_Lee\"<\/a>

A young Harper Lee, her thoughts no doubt consumed by the New York Mets.<\/p><\/div>\n

Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. Ever since news of her lost novel hit last week, the famously reclusive writer has been everywhere\u2014trending on Twitter, spawning lists, smiling above the fold on the front page of today\u2019s New York Times<\/em>. Naturally, there\u2019s been as much controversy as delight: Is the elderly author being taken advantage of? Does she want the book released? According to her lawyer, the author is humiliated by such allegations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whatever you think about the release of the novel, the whole thing has started to feel a bit squicky, or at the very least odd. All of this has so little to do with the woman herself. Or so I declared self-righteously to my head over the weekend, when I resolved to take an attitude of superior distaste towards the whole business. When I saw\u00a0a feature on Harper Lee\u2019s New York<\/a> in the\u00a0New York Post,\u00a0<\/em>my lip curled. Until, that is, I glanced at the annotated map and saw that it listed\u2014along with the Yorkville flat where Lee lived off and on for decades, Capote\u2019s Brooklyn Heights home, and the offices of agent Maurice Crain\u2014the old Shea Stadium.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that, of course, changed everything. As every fan of a punch line team knows, we cannot afford to ignore any fellow travelers in the cause. And Harper Lee: what a get! All of a sudden, I was totally ready to throw my scruples to the wind and use the eighty-eight-year-old\u2019s long-ago devotion to the Mets for my own selfish ends. Or, you know, Mets ends. Since learning this, I have mentioned that Harper Lee was a Mets fan to no fewer than five people, with an air of smug triumph reserved for the truly irrational. \u201cHarper Lee,\u201d I said casually to a businessman reading the paper on the subway. \u201cYou know she was a big Mets fan, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know who loved the Mets?\u201d I demanded of a guy on the street in a Mr. Met\u2013patterned knit hat. \u201cHarper Lee.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

It would be hard to say which of them cared less.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fairness, in a world of tenuous claims, this seems to be a relatively plausible one. Marja Mills, the author of The\u00a0Mockingbird\u00a0Next Door<\/em>, termed Lee \u201ca rabid Mets fan\u201d; Andrew Haggerty described her as \u201cpassionately devoted\u201d to the team. Meanwhile, Lee\u2019s\u00a0biographer Charles Shields told the Post<\/em>, \u201cShe was a big Mets fan\u2014she used to go around with a Mets hat on.\u201d\u00a0And\u00a0Smithsonian <\/em>magazine pointed out (rather gratuitously), that the team was \u201cthe natural choice for someone with an underdog thing as big as the Ritz.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

With all due respect to Julian Casablancas, Jon Stewart, and Anthony Weiner, Harper Lee is the best celebrity-face the Mets have had since the death of P.\u2009G. Wodehouse. She brings with her not merely gravitas and mystery, but all the moral authority of Atticus Finch. Clearly, the Mets are (as we always suspected, on sometimes tenuous evidence) the choice of the morally righteous.<\/p>\n

You might say: It\u2019s a very different team now. It\u2019s a very different world. The Mets aren\u2019t lovable underdogs anymore; they\u2019re just another rich team who\u2019s badly managed, whose stadium has the name of a huge bank. Harper Lee wearing a Mets cap in the sixties has nothing to do with the team today, and certainly has nothing to do with you. But you can\u2019t really look at the world that way, certainly not in the preseason. You gotta believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review\u00a0and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. Ever since news of her lost novel hit last week, the famously reclusive writer has been everywhere\u2014trending on Twitter, spawning lists, smiling above the fold on the front page of today\u2019s New York Times. Naturally, there\u2019s been as much controversy as delight: Is the elderly author being taken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16970,375,14279,16969,5821,16968,125,13028,13642,13117,2705],"class_list":["post-82516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-atticus-finch","tag-baseball","tag-fandom","tag-go-set-a-watchman","tag-harper-lee","tag-mets","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-mets","tag-new-york-post","tag-to-kill-a-mockingbird","tag-truman-capote"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRejoice: Harper Lee Is (or Was) a Mets Fan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein was on the apocryphal but nevertheless critical connection between Harper Lee and one of the most beleaguered teams in baseball.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/09\/hot-stove\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hot Stove by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 9, 2015 \u2013 Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. 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