The Danish novelist Peter Høeg is a writer of thrillingly promiscuous intellectual curiosity, and his new novel, “The Quiet Girl” (FSG, 424 pages, $26), is so clamorous with incident and ideas that, by the end of it, you feel less like you’ve just read a book than had it thrown with great enthusiasm at your face. Nevertheless, it is completely immersive and riveting; I found myself leaving parties early to get back to it. There is more wit, gravity, and madcap pleasure in “The Quiet Girl” than in any new book I’ve read in recent memory.

It would be useless to attempt a thorough summary of the novel’s ambitiously dense narrative in this space, but that doesn’t matter, because the characters and tone in “The Quiet Girl” are far more important than the plot. Mr. Høeg’s protagonist is the philosophical Kasper Krone, an aging and passionate circus clown who has played the world’s great stages before adoring crowds but now lives in a trailer by some horse stables in Denmark (where “the wind … wrapped itself around the heart and filled it with Siberian sadness”). His acrobatic training has enabled him to smash skulls (“The backward head butt is the Dom Pérignon of stage fighting …”) and casually toss assailants from nearby windows — skills he’ll put to good use against the assortment of villains Mr. Høeg has assembled — but what’s really remarkable about Kasper is his supernatural sense of hearing. He can “access people’s acoustic essence” — know them, sense their shifting moods and impulses, anticipate their actions. This kind of hearing is as good as sight: “You could stand in front the women’s locker room at an indoor swimming pool and feel as if you were with the women inside.”

On the verge of being extradited to serve five years in a Spanish prison for tax evasion, Kasper is contacted by a child named KlaraMaria, the quiet girl of the title. The child has extrasensory abilities like his, but heightened — she can create a space where “the acoustic organization of reality in time and space did not exist” — and also, unfortunately, she has been kidnapped. Fleeing the authorities in a series of extraordinary escapes, Kasper tries to track KlaraMaria down and unravel the bizarre circumstances of her kidnapping, which seems to have been arranged by a calculating sociopath named Kain and has something to do with earthquakes. Swerving in and out of the narrative are countless flavorful characters — mostly female — who could all live full lives as protagonists of their own novels.

This novel’s pace is breakneck, almost reckless — Mr. Høeg writes in distinctive staccato sentences — but the momentum feels maniacally assured and frequently euphoric. (“The Quiet Girl” reminded me — just a bit — of James Ellroy’s totemic “L.A. Confidential” in that both novels are essentially just staggering, kinetic cascades of information.) Mr. Høeg has equipped Kasper with a melancholy wit and a penchant for gnomic proclamation, which are useful for those moments when the clown decides to step out of the action and gently slow it with commentary. “For children to know where the abyss is, and be careful,” he tells a startled little girl, “you need to take them all the way out there and show them the edge.” By the end of “The Quiet Girl,” it’s the children taking the adults out to the edge.

Kasper’s life is permeated with awe and fear of women. He loves them — one in particular, named Stina — but it’s the kind of love that can’t sit still and that maybe grabs wrists a little too hard when stirred up by anger. Or by jealousy, for that matter: “Deep down, isn’t it totally unacceptable for any woman to have had any lover but you?” Why, even though it is so thrilling to be in the presence of women, do they always seem to bring strife and sorrow to the clown, he wonders. “Why had he never succeeded himself? In finding the right woman. Gentle. Patient. Loyal. Why were the women in his life Furies?” There are some men for whom gentleness and patience are about as exciting as warm milk; Kasper is one of them, and such men tend to end up with Furies.

Exhaustion sets in near the conclusion of “The Quiet Girl” (how could it not, given the energy and density of the preceding pages?), but it doesn’t really matter. “We exist like beach fleas on a whale of submerged powers we can’t control,” writes Mr. Høeg, and readers will skitter like beach fleas across this behemoth of a plot. It’s no use trying to turn it over or take it apart, at least not on a first reading. Better just to stay on top of it and enjoy the experience; there are few others as fine.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Alan Lightman.