The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In this novel set in the years before the start of the Vietnam War, the jaded British journalist Fowler and the idealistic and naive American Pyle are at odds with one another on both a personal and moral level. In some ways a thriller a la the works of John LeCarre, with numerous political subtexts and subtleties, it's a fairly quick read and not all that difficult to digest, though it does induce much post-reading deliberation and thought. It would probably be worth accompanying this novel with some nonfiction about the French Indochina War (not that I did).