** spoiler alert ** 
 I don't know. I guess this is what you would get if you crossed Ernest Hemingway with John le Carre? Maybe. 
 The Quiet American is the story of a British journalist covering the war in 1950s French Indochina and the annoying American who disrupts his complacent lifestyle. Sure, he's in a war zone, but he has never had it better. He has a beautiful girl by his side and he finds it possible to remain relatively safe, both physically and emotionally--physically in that most of his reporting duties occur behind the front lines; and emotionally in that he is able to convince himself of Britain's (and by extension his) lack of involvement with the war itself. It is their problem. 
 The annoying American changes all that, and it seems to me the American--Pyle, by name--is presented by Greene as an extension of America itself: innocent in its idealistic principles, yet dangerous in its perceived lack of guilt for the harm its idealism causes. 
 Without getting into specifics, there is more to Pyle than meets the eye, and even though I did not love this story as much as I had hoped to, it did pull together for me in the end. The protagonist learns that at some point, it becomes necessary to make a choice and become involved no matter how adamantly you believe in your own neutrality. Greene does write with a remarkable degree of restraint--in my opinion, his writing could even be said to be too restrained--which is how he packs a story with such complexity into a reasonable number of pages. The problem I had with it lay mostly in the fact that I did not experience much of a connection with any of the characters' relationships. Though Pyle and Fowler essentially fight over a girl, it is a girl whom neither of them seems to really love, and the two men themselves don't actually develop any quantifiable bond of friendship that would have otherwise made the story more affecting. 
 Anyway, I am not done with Graham Greene yet. Some guy on Goodreads named Ben told me to read The End of the Affair, so I suppose that is what I'll go ahead and do next.