In Phat Diem, Fowler stays with the Lieutenant, a well-trained military officer who shows Fowler evidence of incredible violence and destruction. Pyle is a poor dancer, but his gallantry makes Fowler conscious of his own age and coarseness.Ī few days after Pyle meets Phuong, Fowler flies out of Saigon to Phat Diem, a town where, it’s rumored, there have been Communist attacks and bombings.

Pyle, Fowler, and Phuong move on to the Chalet, another local establishment, where Pyle, who speaks bad French, politely asks Phuong to dance. At the hotel, Fowler is surprised to find Pyle, whom he greets. She is much younger than he, and her sister, Miss Hei, is irritated with him for being unable to marry Phuong-Fowler is married to a woman, Helen Fowler, in England. That night, Fowler thinks about his turbulent relationship with Phuong. Shortly thereafter, Fowler and Phuong, who are still lovers at this time, go to the Continental Hotel to drink and dance. Fowler finds Pyle naïve, but thinks that there’s something charming and endearing about his boyishness. Pyle subscribes to the ideas of the political thinker York Harding, who believed that Vietnam and other Eastern nations needed a Third Force-neither colonialism nor Communism.

Pyle works for the Economic Aid Mission, an American institution that tries to promote economic security in Vietnam. Pyle is young, handsome, and quiet-altogether unlike most of the Americans Fowler knew in Vietnam. The novel then unfolds largely in flashbacks.įowler remembers meeting Pyle at a bar. Although Fowler explains very little to Vigot, he privately remembers his relationship with Pyle, noting that Pyle, an agent for the American government, was responsible for at least fifty deaths in Vietnam. The police inspector, Vigot, suspiciously asks Fowler what he knows about Pyle and Pyle’s death. After hours of waiting, a police officer calls Fowler in to the police station, where Fowler learns that Pyle has been killed and thrown under a bridge. Fowler is waiting for Alden Pyle, the young American for whom Phuong has left Fowler. Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English reporter, lives in Saigon with his ex-lover, Phuong Hei. We begin in Vietnam in the 1950s, at the height of the tension between French colonialism and local Vietnamese Communism.

The quiet americans book