Ross Miller meets the challenge of writing
about long-time friend Philip Rother

The first three in a planned eight-volume set of Philip Roth’s books from the Library of America (LOA) editions, spanning the novelist’s entire literary output.

When Philip Roth, America’s finest living writer, asked Ross Miller to be his biographer, the UConn English professor was not sure it was something he should do.

He thought he might be too close to his subject.

Miller first encountered Roth in the early 1970s at the home of Miller’s uncle, playwright Arthur Miller.

Author of Goodbye Columbus (1959) and two significant novels, Roth had just become a reluctant celebrity with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).

Miller’s “long intellectual friendship” with Roth began more than a decade later in the mid-1980s, when he struck up a casual conversation with the author at a party.

They would continue to stay in touch.

In the summer of 1984, Miller says, Roth called unexpectedly, asking whether he could send a typescript of a book that he was working on.

The book was The Counterlife.

“He had always used a few readers (even when he worked with an editor) during the writing, usually when he’d finished and was waiting for galleys to come back,” Miller says.

 “I think this was perhaps the earliest he’d asked a friend for a close critical reading of a work in progress.”

When he had finished marking up the manuscript, Miller went to see Roth at his Connecticut home. The subsequent conversation lasted 10 hours.

This was the beginning of an intense literary relationship that has lasted to this day.

“From that summer of 1984 I have read all of his work in early drafts. This extraordinary closeness to a working writer has provided me an invaluable perspective as a biographer. I have very often been a participant in or an observer of the scenes I’m describing [in the biography],” Miller says.

“For the earlier periods I have talked to Roth at length (at least 50 hours of recorded interviews) about his life and work and interviewed the author’s friends and associates. I don’t know of any clear precedent for this,” he says, noting not even James Boswell, the 18th-century biographer of English dictionary author Samuel Johnson, knew his subject as well and for as long as Miller has known Roth.

Houghton Mifflin will publish the biography in 2013, when Roth turns 80.

Currently Miller is also the editor of an eight-volume Library of America (LOA) edition of the novelist’s entire literary output, including an updated chronology and notes.

LOA has published comprehensive collections for only two other writers, Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, when they were still alive.

The editing project began in 2004.

Three volumes are finished and the fourth will be published in October, the same month as the debut of Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost.

English professor Ross Miller in the study of his home.

Photo by Peter Morenus

An author and architectural and literary critic, Miller makes clear he is writing what he calls the “definitive” (as opposed to approved or “authorized”) biography of Roth.

He has what no other writer could have — intimate knowledge of the life and work of his subject and “complete freedom and access” to all of Roth’s work.

 “The nature of the agreement is whatever I want I get, including unprecedented access to him,” Miller says.

 “He, of course, has the right of review, but I do not require his approval for anything I write.”

Miller continues to spend at least three hours every other month interviewing his subject and remains in close touch as Roth continues to publish award-winning novels.

This spring Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction for an unprecedented third time. Miller hopes to clear up certain persistent misconceptions about Roth, particularly the notion that he is an “autobiographical” writer.

Roth, Miller says, “is paradoxically one of the least autobiographical writers even though his fiction invites comparisons to his life.”

Roth’s inaccessibility to literary journalists has exacerbated this misunderstanding.

“Not only do I want to show the life, which is what biographies do, but to demonstrate how these books work as aesthetic objects (exclusive of the life), because that’s what they are fundamentally,”  Miller says.

 “There are some writers you could write a critical biography of, in terms of just the fiction, or a ‘life’ exclusive of the books, but really Roth has no life unrelated to what he writes. Fiction and fact are seamlessly entwined. It’s part of my job to untangle them for the sake of analysis.”

Miller believes writers, particularly novelists, are “ruthless” because “they write about everything and not only things personal to them but also things personal to other people.

“Working with Roth, not only on his work but certainly my work as well, has been an invaluable tutorial,” Miller says.

 “It’s my post-doctoral education, and it has made me a better, perhaps more ruthless writer than I would have been without this experience. Certainly, it’s made me a better biographer.”

Miller, however, realizes how difficult it is to write about a living writer and particularly one who has vigilantly guarded his privacy throughout his whole life.

 “How can there not be sensitivities that I did not anticipate?” he says.

This inevitability, Miller adds, has created “a beneficial critical distance between us as friends that helps both of us write” and that working on the biography has also made him a better reader.

“Even though Roth writes seductively with beautiful language and a seemingly accessible style, he’s quite intimidating because of the density of thinking in the narrative,” Miller explains as he would while discussing the novelist with his students.

“In Roth’s work thinking is a form of action in these books — a sliding irony or point of view, so you can be inside the head of many characters simultaneously . . . The reader must know that it’s Roth’s consciousness controlling it all. Unless the reader slows down he misses the beauty, misses the whole show.”

— Karen Singer ’73 (CLAS)

Seeing the bottom of the sea

A new web site developed by Peter Auster and Ralph Lewis, faculty in the department of marine sciences at UConn’s Avery Point campus, shows marine life beneath the waves of Long Island Sound.

The project is a collaboration between the University’s National Undersea Research Center (NURC) and the Long Island Sound Resource Center, a partnership of UConn and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

The image shown above is an anemone, which has specialized stinging cells on its tentacles to capture plankton and food particles.

The web site is at: www.lisrc.uconn.edu/lis_uwtour.

Addressing a rare genetic skin disorder

Despite its stable appearance, skin is in a nearly constant state of flux, shedding and re-forming.

When the process goes awry, the result can be a troubling disease.

By studying a rare genetic skin disorder, UConn researchers at the School of Medicine hope to broaden understanding of important biological mechanisms in healthy humans.

Ernst Reichenberger, assistant professor of reconstructive medicine, is leading the effort in the Center for Restorative Medicine and Skeletal Development to study keloids, a relatively rare wound-healing disorder that affects mostly darker skinned populations in the U.S. and around the world.

The research is supported by a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Keloids occur when scar tissue keeps growing beyond the margin of a wound, resulting in a tumor-like growth that can grow continually.

They can arise from a small scratch, a bug bite, even from acne.

They are usually physically painful and, because of their appearance, are often emotionally distressing.

The researchers are recruiting individuals who tend to form keloids.

Reichenberger’s goal is to find the genetic mutations that cause the disorder and understand the molecular structure necessary to develop effective treatments.

“We take a genetic approach to the study of human disease,” says Reichenberger.

“To find out how certain mechanisms operate in a healthy person, we study human genetic disorders in which they    are disrupted.”

Patient volunteers will be recruited on a national basis with the help of physicians in other states.

International volunteers will be recruited from two clinics in Nigeria with the collaboration of Victoria Odesina, a UConn clinical researcher born in Nigeria.

As they recruit volunteers for the study, researchers will collect DNA samples for genome scans using microarray technology that allows simultaneous evaluation of thousands of gene markers.

They will compare the genomes of affected and unaffected family members, and find out which genome intervals are shared by those affected with the disorder.

Connecticut population slows

Connecticut will experience slow population growth and could see a decline in its population in the coming years without the continued influx of foreign-born immigrants, according to the first population projections compiled in 12 years by the Connecticut State Data Center (CtSDC) based in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UConn.

Statewide, from 2005 to 2030, the total population is expected to grow by 6 percent, according to the CtSDC projections. During that same period, the CtSDC forecasts that the statewide number of residents over the age of 65 will increase by nearly 75 percent while the number of children 19 and under in Connecticut will drop by about 8 percent.

The study also suggests that the state, which already has among the highest levels of socio-economic segregation in the nation, is becoming more segregated and is likely to see further erosion of its middle class over the next two decades.

Connecticut is expected to grow by just under 207,500 residents from 2005 to 2030, reaching a total population of 3.7 million residents, according to the CtSDC projections.

The state’s predicted annual growth rate of 0.27 percent — equivalent to fewer than three new residents per every 1,000 current residents — is less than one-third of the national annual growth rate of 0.85 percent, ranking Connecticut 38th for population growth nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A birth rate of 2.1 children per woman is needed to maintain current population levels. Nationally, the birth rate is only 2.05 children per woman and, in Connecticut, the birth rate is even lower — 1.83 children per woman.

The demographic shifts underway are part of a national pattern that also will see a decline in the white population and a growth in minority populations but many of the trends appear more pronounced in Connecticut, says Orlando Rodriguez, a UConn demographer and manager of CtSDC.

Connecticut’s white population, which currently accounts for 77 percent of the state’s population, will account for just barely 61 percent of the state’s population by 2030, the study says.

In addition to the state’s decline in white population, Connecticut also stands to lose about 3 percent—over 60,000 members — of its workforce.

“If not for foreign-born immigration to Connecticut, which reached a 17-year high in 2005, the state would likely see its population begin to shrink, a scenario which would seriously erode Connecticut’s workforce and would place Connecticut at greater risk of losing seats in the U.S. House of Representatives,” says Rodriguez.

Connecticut lost one seat during the last congressional reapportionment in 2002.

CtSDC population projections, for Connecticut statewide, towns and counties can be accessed online at http://ctsdc.uconn.edu.

An invasive shrub

Jonathan Lehrer and Jessica Lubell, both doctoral candidates in plant science, are conducting research on the Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii DC.), a widespread invasive shrub that is popular in the nursery business.

Lehrer is examining the seedlings produced by colored-leaf genotypes of the plant while Lubell is identifying the variety of cultivated Japanese barberry plants by using DNA fingerprinting.

They were among a group of graduate students in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources who participated in the college’s 2007 Graduate Student Research Forum, which included oral and visual presentations by master’s and doctoral candidates from all departments within the college.