“[N]othing ages faster than today’s idea of the future,” wrote architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, which may explain why readers treasure the rare novel that correctly predicts what’s to come. The classics of the prescient genre tend be speculative and dystopian—1984, Parable of the Sower, The Handmaid’s Tale—but can also be realist fiction. Take English author Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in the United States in 1956, which predicted the future by describing the present.

The Quiet American takes place in 1950s Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh’s forces are fighting French colonial powers for independence. It’s narrated by Thomas Fowler, a jaded middle-aged British correspondent who has been hiding out from an unhappy marriage for years in Saigon, where he’s involved in a long-term affair with a Vietnamese woman named Phoung. The story’s inciting incident is the arrival of Alden Pyle, an idealistic young member of the “American Economic Mission”—which is to say, he’s a not-very-well-disguised CIA operative—who has come to try to cultivate a U.S.-backed “third force,” neither communist nor colonialist, in Indochina.

“[N]othing ages faster than today’s idea of the future,” wrote architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, which may explain why readers treasure the rare novel that correctly predicts what’s to come. The classics of the prescient genre tend be speculative and dystopian—1984, Parable of the Sower, The Handmaid’s Tale—but can also be realist fiction. Take English author Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in the United States in 1956, which predicted the future by describing the present.

The Quiet American takes place in 1950s Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh’s forces are fighting French colonial powers for independence. It’s narrated by Thomas Fowler, a jaded middle-aged British correspondent who has been hiding out from an unhappy marriage for years in Saigon, where he’s involved in a long-term affair with a Vietnamese woman named Phoung. The story’s inciting incident is the arrival of Alden Pyle, an idealistic young member of the “American Economic Mission”—which is to say, he’s a not-very-well-disguised CIA operative—who has come to try to cultivate a U.S.-backed “third force,” neither communist nor colonialist, in Indochina.

The Quiet American, Graham Greene, Penguin Classics, 208 pp., $18, August 2004, paperback

Fowler is cynical and tired and speaks mainly sarcastic one-liners; Pyle is earnest and eager and illiterate in irony. Pyle falls in love with Phoung, propelling the story’s conflict, which serves as a metaphor for Cold War power struggle. It’s a little strange for a novel about a love triangle in which two of the characters are flat to have such staying power. (Perhaps because of the bias of Fowler’s first-person narration, Phoung exists as little more than metaphor for Vietnam, while Pyle is less an individual than a representative of the United States abroad.) But besides the quiet fury of Greene’s prose, the novel owes its endurance to two main elements.

First, the book anticipated the horror of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam with eerie precision. Pyle’s cultivation of a third force, the dangerous........

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