Bobbie is not a hero. He is not a villain. He is a case study.After fleeing the former Yugoslavia under dangerous circumstances, Bobbie drifts across the world-running drugs, reading people, loving women, and surviving on charm. Along the way, he learns how systems really work: who benefits, who looks away, and how kindness and corruption often share a face. When he lands in Bend, Oregon, he brings that education with him. What begins as a modest operation involving converted vans, ski culture, and fringe medical entrepreneurship metastasizes into a multistate network of clinics, businesses, political alliances, and ideological contradictions. Everyone is making money. No one is getting better. Populated by white lesbians laundering money through alternative medicine, Mormon leaders weaponizing optimism, Albanian suppliers with better logistics than ethics, and communities convinced they are saving someone else, the novel skewers modern American virtue. Through Bobbie's unreliable narration, it dismantles wellness culture, vanlife capitalism, performative progressivism, faith-based entrepreneurship, and systems that insist they are benevolent.As the empire grows, so does the rot. Clinics collapse into addiction camps. Expansion plans resemble crusades. Personal relationships fracture under ambition, denial, and untreated trauma. Bobbie deteriorates-physically, psychologically, spiritually-while insisting everything is under control. This is not satire for comfort. It does not ask you to like Bobbie. It asks whether you recognize him.
