[In the following review, Guidry praises Sillitoe's use of the interior monologue in The Widower's Son.]

A military man is Alan Sillitoe's newest hero [in The Widower's Son], opening up for the author a wide range of metaphor having to do with campaign and strategy, attack and defense, victory and defeat, as applied to personal relationships.

William Scorton, whose experience is chronicled here from his teens to his early fifties, has a character that appears to have been as much reinforced as created by military life. So it may be incorrect to blame the army for the downfall that temporarily wrecks his adjustment to civilian life. The role of master-gunner suited Scorton, put his aggressiveness to respectable use. But after 20 years, including some time as an officer, he was ready to explore the outer world. “I love you,” he tells his wife, Georgina, assuring her with customary directness that she will not be hurt by the change. “The army phase of my life's ended. I want another to begin. I'm not the sort who rots away.”

Georgina, a brigadier general's daughter, has good reason for doubts about the next phase of their life together. She knows the positive side of military service and its ability to provide purpose and structure for the individuals under its control. The author thus seems to have stacked the cards against his central characters—service children inadequately prepared for mid-life crises which are intensified in this instance by a sudden switch to civilian life.

But if army life provides the basic tone of this story, it is far from limiting. Scorton's musings, his struggles to do right, his puzzlement over aspects of the human condition, though couched often in terms of military experience and observation, are easily appreciated for their general aptness and poetical intensity.

Mr. Sillitoe's earlier novels include Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. He is an accomplished writer of evocative dialogue. But his most appealing passages are those of interior monologue—those impromptu gropings toward a coherent and satisfying view of life—typified by Scorton's thoughts while bicycling:

There was no monotony in pedaling, as if the wheels worked a well to draw up thoughts from underground. Times had altered. People often felt this when they got older, but he had entered a state of calm beneficial chaos where regimentation of the spirit no longer had any place. … Nothing stays still—even my bicycle when I'm not thinking of pedaling. Chaos mustn't get the upper hand, though we don't want to get back to the brainless and soulless sort of order we had before.

Such blending of points of view—the author describing, his fictional creation ruminating, almost indistinguishably—bring the reader into subtle union with the very essence of the story: self-knowledge attaining ever higher levels.