The Widower's Son is … a novel about two generations of one family, and much of its main narrative covers … the period just after the war, which seems, for a great many English writers writing today, in its paradox of victory and decline, its upset hierarchies and devaluation of sacred trusts, to be a recognizable parallel for the aging and disillusionment of the individual. Certainly that is true of Sillitoe's novel, which traces the rise of William Scorton, grandson of a miner and son of an army sergeant, to the rank of Colonel, cuckold and madman on the easy path of the age.

Sillitoe … often writes about the isolation of the individual from society, and in a way The Widower's Son is about traveling too far and too fast from one's own origins…. The army, for Sillitoe, is the emblem of everything which tears men away from the earth, from nature, and from family…. [The] army divides [William] both from his historical place as a miner's grandson, earthy, lower-class, simple in his habits, and from his acquired position among the upper classes, educated into finer tastes, obsessed by his wife, Georgina. Though he loves his father and is in love with his wife, he understands neither.

In one scene, furious with Georgia, William punches her around "like a collier," in short, as his grandfather might have done. Throughout the novel there are references to historical cycles; to the past rising up to alter the perspective of the present. For William, the colliery is part of that past. But a more important part is his mother's death, which left him, while he was still a child, with only half a history. The Widower's Son divides the world into two principles: a male principle of order, control, power, of which gunnery is an obvious and potent symbol; and a female principle of emotion, confusion, and passivity, of which Georgina is a rather extreme embodiment. (pp. 264-65)

Sillitoe's strength lies in making William and his father sympathetic and complex characters; in showing William's failings not as those of a martinet, though he speaks often of his own rigidity, but as an imbalance common to the species which one can recognize everywhere. Though Sillitoe tends to classify psychic qualities by gender, and though his novel centers on a struggle between the sexes, the incompleteness which causes that struggle is poignantly and quite comprehensively human. (p. 265)