3 Under 3

The Best Writers Under Three Years Old Working Today

Sherri O’Neill, Toilet is Where I Go Potty, Riverhead Books

O’Neill has been a fixture on the literary scene since she was two, but her more mature work has silenced earlier critics. Toilet is Where I Go Potty, her latest work, is no mere bildungsroman, nor mere tale of waste-ed youth. O’Neill’s ambivalence about her diaper reflects our own ambivalence with our rapidly-changing world. On the one hand, she suggests, the dirty diaper of our consciousness is comforting, a warm reminder of our essential animus. And yet, she points out, it gives her “a rash.” There are no easy answers in O’Neill’s worldview; she is no polemicist, she is not looking to “change” your mind. She is only looking to change her diaper. But what is change, she asks? Must we always suffer it? The reader is left wondering. As for Sherri, when her diaper at last comes off – when change comes, inevitably, inexorably, as it does for us all - all she can do is throw her head back and wail.

Javier Rodriguez, I Have Ball, FSG Originals

“I have ball,” Rodriguez writes in his impressive debut I Have Ball, but be advised: Rodriguez’s auto-fictional universe is a dark and unstable one. What is will not always be, what is is not what was, what was is not yours and what’s his is no longer:

“I lost ball,” Rodriguez continues, and our hearts break with his. His prose is as spare and unforgiving as the world he finds himself in, a world of instability and insecurity, where one moment there are balls, the next moment there are not. Rodriguez is playing with his reader here; we don’t know if the ball was stolen or lost – or if the ball, like hope itself, has popped. This is not easy reading, but for those who make it through to the end, a surprise waits:

“I have hat,” writes Rodriguez.

Not another ball, not even a new ball; this is no Hollywood ending. The ball is gone, and with it a part of his soul. But he has a hat. He has a hat, and with that to warm his mind, Rodriguez suggests, he can warm his heart, too.

Omondi Goldfarb, Meltdown in Walmart, Audible.com

Omondi Goldfarb, as their name suggests, is a citizen of the world: their father is Kenyan-Russian, their mother is Jewish-Korean, their passport is British, their crib is from China and their onesie is from Vietnam. There’s no way they weren’t going to win some fucking literary award. But what’s most remarkable about Goldfarb’s prose, however, is not what it contains, but what it lacks: words.

Goldfarb screams. They throw themselves down on the floor and kick and scream – and who among us can blame them? What place is there in this late age, they seem to ask, for mere words? What is there left to say? Goldfarb’s work is the first to be available only in audiobook form – there is no book, because what role can a book play any longer in this disintegrating (and dis-integrating!) world of fleeting image and cacophonous sound? Meltdown in Walmart, Goldfarb’s fiery follow-up to the best-selling Screams From the Booster Seat, is the future of prose, a prose-less prose, a less-prose prose, a prose less-ness, a ness-less lessness-ness, a narrative as lost as our spirit, and we scream with Goldfarb as their parents – their guardians, their elders, their pasts and their presents – impotently implore them to stop, threatening them with all manner of deprivations. “If you don’t stop, we’re going straight home!” we hear them shouting in the background. “No ice cream!”

But in the desolate Walmart of the Anthropocene, Goldfarb suggests, “I scream” is all we can do.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

NOTE: Yes I do feel better now.

illustrations by orli auslander

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