From a Wall Street Journal story by Emily Bobrow headlined “Alice McDermott Is OK With Being Called a ‘Woman’s Novelist'”:

Alice McDermott recalls reading the novel “The Quiet American” as a college student in the 1970s and being struck by the ridiculousness of Graham Greene’s female characters: “They were clichés, childish and unbelievable.” Although she was impressed by how “brilliantly” he foresaw the “political fiasco” of America’s time in Vietnam, she bristled over a scene in which the book’s narrator, a grizzled British journalist, gazes at some clean-looking “American girls” eating ice cream in the Saigon heat and envies their simple “sterilized world.” “It was so dismissive,” she says. “I remember, even at 19, thinking, ‘No, that can’t be right.’”