The Quiet American is an educational depiction of American involvement in Vietnam in the early '50s. The cynical British journalist Fowler is high on opium, whereas the "quiet American" Pyle is high on American idealism. A love triangle ensues when Pyle falls for Phuong, Fowler's young and beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

While Phuong is a character central to the novel, there is very little character to speak of. She's an object, a Vietnamese porcelain doll, to be bartered, possessed, and protected by the men she encounters. She acts as a security blanket for Fowler, protecting him against a vision of middle-aged loneliness. And for Pyle, another projection of his idealism, a body to save, marry and take to America with the white picket fence.

The novel was considered anti-American when it was first published for its charge against a strand of American idealism characterized by cultural ignorance, ideological inconsistency, and an obsession with exceptionalism. However, Greene's attitude toward Pyle (and, by extension, America) isn't black-and-white. In fact, Fowler says with begrudged appreciation: “All the time his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favor, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas, with my cynicism. Oh I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he perhaps a better man.”