The Quiet American
I finished The Quiet American, my first Graham Greene book a while ago - I had written in March (looking at those pictures makes me tear up) that I wanted to tackle it, and I foolishly thought that as a small book it would be quickly read. I haven't written about it to date because I haven't known where to start. Now that I'm up to the task I'll begin with why I was attracted to it. The book is a vew of "American" from the outside, and from a Britton. I feel myself teetering on an inside and outside experience of being American and I thought this book would let me interact with that.
The book is really about Vietnam and the ideas about being "American" are really an undergirding. It's about war and journalism - the process by which we come to understand the events around us. It's about an old British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American, Alden Pyle. It is about old men and young men's love - and the crevice between them.
Before reading the book I knew Vietnam vaguely in terms of the war and the glut of films I'd seen about it. I ended up printing out a map in order to orient myself - Greene writes with an assumption of the reader's understanding of the geography and I had none. Lately I've only bought critical editions of "classic" books and in this case it was wise - mine contained a short and engaging history and context of American involvement in Vietnam. I had no idea of the interplay before the war between the Chinese, French, Japanese, and British. My American education tells me only about American involvement and American interaction with the world, in fabricated "pivotal" moments.
I disliked the protagonist, the journalist Fowler, probably, ironically, in an American way; he was a man who pretended to be objective, to believe in "nothing." A man who treated his woman like a concubine.
The book begins with the premise of an American ideologue - a young man with books and ideals who arrives in Vietnam to inspire a "third force" - an alternative to the hapless French and "evil" communists who have been fighting each other. What do I mean by ideologue? In this context I refer to a person who becomes so enraptured by a framework of ideas that they cease to reconcile it with practical realism.
Beyond an ideologue, the American Greene paints is a man who sees the world only in his terms, no matter how absurd it may be. At one point the young American points to a cafe and says that it could "almost be a soda fountain." I almost laughed aloud at how true this was, recalling countless conversations where a person would ask me about Africa on American terms.
The young American, in a misguided sense, believes in love. His is not a love of necessity or arrangement, it is a love of choice. A large, somewhat quiet, "third person" role in the book was that of Phuong, a Vietnamese woman who is between the older British protagonist/narrator and the young American. With no regard for her past involvement with the older gentleman reporter, the American steals her away, imposing her "choice" and his overwhelming affection with regards to love.
Finally, the young American believes in a notion of "greater good." That is to say that deception and even death can be reconciled as a sacrifice for something greater - in this case it is Democracy. His clandestine activities in Vietnam render this thesis over and over, with the older, cautious, and more worldly British protagonist/narrator watching with a sickened fascination.
This is only one dimmension of a much larger story, but it was the one which I was able to follow most closely. It had a few merits but on the whole, albeit that I'm indoctrinated, I found myself disliking it more and more as each page passed.
Americans are ideologues. George Washington was an ideologue. The people who come here to find a future are also ideologues and that is where their American-ness begins. The focal point of that ideology is idealism; that good and evil exist; a notion that the world can be better, that our individual actions can find traction here to bring that "better" closer to us - for some that means closer to their children as they see thier lives as mere stepping stones for a better future.
Ideology is dangerous, and when it mixes with an idea that necessary sacrifice can be made it becomes a very potent evil. We forget to ask ourselves who sacrifices, who dies as a result of any "noble" effort. But the world needs ideas, and it most certainly needs ideals. It needs fools who believe in love. It needs the sort of simple mindedness that can say "all men are created equal."
There's so much more to this book that I can't help feeling like I'm selling it short. I have yet to finish all the critical responses in the back of my edition. But it's revealed my American-ness to me - those unscripted tendencies that I've slowly assumed while being here. It shows me how American idealism and hope can be, simultaneously, a greatest strength and weakness.
8:30:26 PM 
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