Following a friend’s suggestion, I am reading my way through the novels of James Gould Cozzens. I find him very simpatico — the cold eye.

Savor this, from The Last Adam (1933). The subject is a small-town politician who has eschewed big, political ambitions even though …

He had all the qualifications. As well as a native, half-knavish wit, his was that careful mean shrewdness by which alone a man can climb, not too visibly soiled, through the sewer-like lower labyrinth of American politics. Henry Harris had, too, the bland, impregnable assurance required to rule on top.