[In the following, the critic offers a mixed review of Sundown.]

The god of the great Osages was still dominant over the wild prairie and the Blackjack Hills when Chal Windzer was born. His Indian father, out of a vague and rather pointless ecstasy which assailed him on the night of his son's birth, had called him Challenge, saying: "He shall be a challenge to the disinheritors of his people." Though what it was the boy was to challenge, John Windzer never knew and his son never succeeded in finding out.

Sundown presents a very moving picture of the first years of Chal's life, his response to the legends of his race, his education as a day student at the reservation school, and his hero worship of his politically minded father. By the time Chal had grown to adolescence and had begun to face the problem of his future, there was plenty of money at his disposal. There were rich deposits of oil on the Osage land and the Indians, in spite of the best efforts of their white "guardians," had managed to get hold of some of the profits.

So Chal went to the State university, and because he was rather handsome and a good football player and reputed to be wealthy, he was immediately accepted into the collegiate social life. His adjustment to it, however, was a difficult one. He was intensely self-conscious, he couldn't master the small talk of his fraternity brothers and he was profoundly puzzled by their opinions and attitudes—their desire for good marks in classes, their nagging and furtive interest in the simple facts of love and mating. Believing the civilization of the white man to be superior, he grew ashamed of his Indian friends at college—constantly afraid, for some reason or other, that they would behave like Indians. For his part, he devoted himself to becoming as much as possible like his white companions.

Naturally active and intelligent, yet with no aim in life beyond the simple and momentary indulgences of drinking and love-making, Chal found a temporary respite in the outbreak of the war. He was sure of one thing—that he wanted to fly. He left college abruptly to join the aviation corps and remained in the service after the war, although by that time most of the zest and novelty had gone out of flying. At the death of his father he resigned and came home to the village where he had been born—now a garish and prosperous boom town.

In Kihekah there was no work for him to do and enough money so that he didn't need to look for any. Playing about with a group of young loafers, drinking and dancing all night, and tearing over the roads in his big car, Chal found himself unable to put a name to his spiritual discontent. He only knew that he came home as infrequently as possible and that he had grown to hate his mother. His sudden understanding that his own inertness, his own lack of purpose, is at the bottom of his mother's contempt for him, moves him to a satisfying boast: "I'm goin' to Harvard law school and take law—I'm gonna be a great orator."

Whether or not Chal has found himself this time, the reader—taking leave of him as he sits asleep in his chair—does not know. In view of his previous resolves, the enthusiasm with which he begins by regarding them and the fashion in which that enthusiasm later deserts him, the implication is that he has not. Sundown is a convincing study of a young Indian's attempt to adjust himself to a fundamentally alien civilization.

In spite of the fact that Mr. Mathews—who is the author of Wah 'Kon-Tah and himself part Osage—writes very ably, the book has a decidedly inarticulate quality, as if the problem he is trying to state had been only half comprehended and is hence not susceptible of clear statement. Perhaps this very quality, which mars the book as a novel, makes it an even more effective social study.