Jonathan Morris is a precocious young person obsessed with his classmate and nemesis Michael Parber, a handsome Golden Boy whose every effortless triumph places Jonny's constant setbacks in ever greater relief. From Jon's jaundiced viewpoint, we follow this tumultuous, largely one-sided animosity as the two mature into gay men, Jon struggling on the margins of the art world and show biz, Parber a major movie star who can do no wrong. Jon plots his revenge on his lifelong foe before a final unexpected turn brings on a poignant, surprising reconciliation.

Funny, relatable, and ultimately heartbreaking, Parber recounts a unique relationship with sharp wit and deep warmth. It also traces decades of cultural history in America, reflecting the agonies and ecstasies of being gay, living out, and navigating the celebrity closet in its twilight, on the cusp of the 21st century. An affecting coming-of-age tale, a hilarious Hollywood novel, and a trenchant chronicle of our age, Parber is a one-of-a-kind book that will make you laugh and cry, then cry and laugh again.

Trust me, there’s always a Parber. With Hollywood and no end of sexual flotsam to enjoy, our young hero nonetheless returns in his mind to that one boy in school, the one whose beauty put him on notice that boys were what he wanted, not girls. But there's one thing worse than that unattainable, unrequited first love: attaining him. Morrison’s rollicking, searing novel takes the reader on a tour of gay life’s inescapable tropes and provides a roadmap to late-twentieth-century pre-internet, pre-pride gay life as we found it—and somehow survived.
   Wilton Barnhardt, 
   author of Lookaway, Lookaway and Western Alliances

Bright nerd Jonny Morris gazes with starry eyes upon his adolescent crush, handsome jock Michael Parber. Each grows up to be an actor—Jon, the quirky, struggling, indie sort; Mike, an A-list supernova and “Sexiest Man Alive 2005!” But as Jon recalls the stages of his infatuation in this fleet-footed novel masquerading as a memoir, a surprisingly complex picture of human entanglement emerges. In witty prose that glitters on the surface but contains hidden feeling, James Morrison performs an ultrasound of gay male existence at the turn of the millennium, tracking cultural and technological change along with the soul-change wrought by political and social progress. Parber is a “comic” novel in the deepest sense of the word.
     Patrick E. Horrigan, author of American Scholar