"To produce a novel that was entirely and deliberately bad — not merely bad at the beginning as part of a plan to tease readers about their desire for naive realism — would be a truly daring artistic move."

The danger, of course, is that people will assume you are simply a bad writer, a risk all the more pronounced when this is your first novel. It’s true, the narrator of “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards” is exactly the sort of writer who would produce a self-involved meta-narrative, but Jansma could be, as well. And surely if Jansma were so fiendishly clever as to devise such a plan, he would have done so in service of a more interesting theme than that most tiresome of authorial assertions, that fiction writers tell “lies.”

From Laura Miller's interesting take on postmodern "sneaky author tricks" in Salon, a critical view that inspired Flavorwire to post their top ten "phenomenally tricky books."

Miller goes after two different, but often related, gimmicks: The reveal that everything you've been reading is a fictionalized account all along, and the gimmick of writing poorly on purpose because your story represents someone else's work.  Miller relies on Ian McEwan and Kristopher Jansma's The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (which I've never heard of), but each of those made me think of a different book: First, Life of Pi (link to Kunal's recent review), which I thought was far more patronizing than Atonement in the exact same fashion that Miller it is criticizing.  Second, The Iron Dream, which asks the question: What if Hitler was a science fiction author?  The Iron Dream is the best example I can think of what Miller's talking about above, a bizarre achievement that's either a total success or a complete failure--and absolutely excruciating to read.

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.

I decided to read this book based on the description, which is the kind of self-referential stuff I enjoy: Instead of becoming dictator of Germany in the 1930's, Hitler immigrates to the United States and becomes a science fiction author. His last work is called The Lord of the Swastika--which is actually what you're reading; the rest is all setup to introduce the false author. The story itself is of Feric Jaggar, a genetically pure "Trueman" intent on freeing his native country of Heldon from the scourge of hideous unpure mutants and especially the evil, mind-manipulating Dominators who are based in the faroff country of Zind.

The point is that the book Hitler would write--a narcissistic, sexually aggressive and racist fasco-fantasy where genetically pure people destroy thinly veiled mutants--resembles much of the science fiction literature that characterized the middle part of the century. By substituting Hitler as the author of the book, Spinrad means not for us to think about Hitler per se, but what we appreciate in fiction and what it says about us.

That's all well and good, but the fact is that Hitler is a terrible writer. Now, I realize, that is somewhat of the point, but that doesn't make Lord of the Swastika, or The Iron Dream, as it's published in real life, any better. It's still full of clodded, awkward writing and nauseating battle fantasies. What concept, no matter how clever, necessitates a full-length book that is necessarily awful? It's enjoyable in a superficial way, I suppose, but not in the way literature ought to be.

I did enjoy, however, the afterword by the fictional Harold Whipple of NYU, which points out the phallic symbolism of the book and relates it to the circumstances of the times, in which the Greater Soviet Union controls all of Eurasia and the United States yearns for a brave leader like Feric Jaggar, which Whipple says accounts for the book's popularity. The best part: "Of wider significance is the book's popularity and the adoption of the swastika motif and colors created in it among as diverse a spectrum of social groups and organizations as the Christian Anti-Communist League, various 'outlaw motorcycle gangs,' and the American Knights of the Bushido."