Why do we stay, why do we walk, why do we run? Why do we do these things even as we remain unmoved? Commodities, a complex but lucid novel, faces these questions unflinchingly. George Artson, a young student and writer, struggles to make sense of his world while beleaguered by a mental illness and a high but confused intelligence. Obsessively, he travels and seeks shelter in various points along the interlacing highways of his life, testing his own limits in the essential mazes of love, friendship, and responsibility. Through carelessness and despair, he has largely laid waste to these things in the years he last lived so far. Now, George tracks back to fix what he can and forward to find out how few mistakes he can create to make his future. In Commodities, following the honest voices of his first-person narrative and fiction, readers can vividly perceive in George's struggle a fable of human identity that may help to illuminate the emotional challenges of their own lives.