Reading Greene The Quiet American
Most people pick up The Quiet American and expect a thriller. What they get instead is a slow, uncomfortable novel about good intentions that never amount to anything useful. I read it three times over the years. It changed very little each time, which is kind of the point. The book is set in 1950s Saigon during the early French colonial period. Thomas Fowler is a British journalist who's settled into a lukewarm life drinking whiskey and avoiding commitment. He gets involved with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and crosses paths with Alden Pym, a young American who talks endlessly about building a "third force" in Vietnam -- something between the French colonizers and the Viet Minh communists. Pym seems earnest. He keeps smiling. That smile is one of the most unsettling things in the whole book.
Greene The Quiet American Themes
The novel doesn't tell you directly what it thinks about anything. That's why rereading it feels different depending on when you read it. In the early 2000s it felt like a prophecy. After twenty years of watching Western powers intervene in places they didn't understand, it feels more like a case study in willful ignorance. Fowler narrates the story with this practiced detachment, the way a guy might describe a bad lunch. But Greene puts enough detail around him that you realize Fowler is lying to himself the whole time. One thing people often miss: Fowler isn't neutral. He makes choices. He lets things happen. That's the quiet American in the title, but it's also Fowler himself. The Americans in the book are just more honest about their lack of empathy than the British cynics think they are. I remember trying to explain this to someone at a bar who kept saying the ending was unfair to Pym. It's not unfair. Greene gives Pym more dignity than he deserves, which is exactly what makes it work. Pym dies believing in something. Fowler survives believing in nothing. The novel asks you to figure out which outcome is worse.
If you want to read it, any major bookseller will have it. Penguin publishes the standard edition. It's short enough to finish in a couple of afternoons but dense enough that you'll probably want to sit with it for a while afterward.
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![Lot - †Graham Greene, "The Quiet American", first edition,](https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/maynardsfineart/62/693662/H0759-L241567590.jpg "Lot - †Graham Greene, "The Quiet American", first edition,")
