Imperishable Bliss is a tragicomic account of the efforts of an unnamed citizen in the final third of the American 20th century to find God. He is the brooding and fretful survivor of a failed attempt at suicide, and captive to a religious vocation as insistently obscure as the unexplained death of his best friend. In a career that devolves through picaresque sieges of evangelism, retreat, Biblical exegetics and physical sacrifice, he is tormented by the company of women and his perplexity about their intentions, which are likely to be subversive.

The reader who described Imperishable Bliss as "maybe the saddest story I ever read" also called it "very subtle and very funny."