The Queen of Tears by Chris McKinney Soho Press, 320 pp, $23

‘Didn’t moviemakers know that life is full of erosions, not explosions?’ asks Soong Lee, the matriarch of the Lee family in local author Chris McKinney’s Queen of Tears, a tale about a troubled family and its slow march towards a tragic end.

McKinney delves into his real grandmother’s past as a famous Korean actress in the 1950s and 1960s to create her fictional counterpart in Queen of Tears. Soong is the lynchpin in her three children’s spiraling lives, which she tries desperately to turn around when she flies to Hawai’i for her son’s wedding.

Soong’s oldest daughter, Won Ju, finds too late that ‘anger and strength are tied together’ as her long, loveless marriage falters. Soong’s son, Donny, marries a stripper mainly to spite his mother. Her youngest daughter, Darian, drops out of Berkeley and begins dating the stripper’s drug-dealing, but clear-hearted, brother. And her grandson becomes the biggest heartache as his teenage angst combusts while his family falls apart around him.

Using multiple points-of-view to build a three-generational story, the strength of McKinney’s keen observations and ear for language cannot hold the many competing voices together. In the end, it is Soong’s storyline that is the most compelling.

In 1952, as a poor, orphaned 14-year-old, Soong stoically makes her way from the countryside to Seoul where she is hit by a car, taken in, trained as an actress and eventually made a star by the man who ran her over. He marries her. After his death, she remarries a Korean-American and lands in Fresno, Calif., with her two young children. Only her third child is born an American.

Soong’s history is interwoven with the present as the family comes together around Donny’s latest, get-rich-quick scheme: a Korean restaurant. Even his stripper wife, Crystal, finds a moment of stability during the first few months of success. But with success comes aggression, and Crystal leaves Donny to live with Won Ju, whose household includes a philandering husband and horny teenage son. As expected, the stripper, living in a household of men, wreaks havoc.

But there are also moments of hope, when the outcome could change, things could go right. And McKinney deftly uses these moments to expose his character’s foibles and complexities.

He rushes to the end, though. Won Ju’s own troubled past only comes to light late in the novel and is almost lost in the fast and final dissolution of the family’s fortunes. Too many voices clutter the narrative and gems get lost in the quick sprint to tragedy.

The novel has great little moments, like when Soong is revealed by her thoughts: ‘To leave it alone would have been like not pulling a loose thread off of a piece of clothing.’ Or when she wonders ‘what diamonds were and what they tasted like.’ Or when she realizes ‘hospitals and emergency care did not prolong life; they prolonged death.’

But all the good lines go to Soong. Her children largely just fall apart. And the only other strong character, Crystal’s brother, comes in as a voice in the last few pages–too little, too late–which makes the final twist melodramatic rather than truly sad.

Too bad McKinney didn’t give this family a little more time, a little more erosion, a smaller explosion. The story has all the makings of an epic, and McKinney has the talent. He just hasn’t given this family enough rope to hang themselves.