Beauty, Truth and the Danish Way : Social criticism--at times insistent, at times satirical--reveals the poverty of Danish inner life : THE HISTORY OF DANISH DREAMS, <i> By Peter Hoeg (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $24; 356 pp.)</i>

One of the many good things that happens to an author when his third book is acclaimed far and wide is that his first and second books receive renewed attention. (This means that whenever one of our books disappears, we console ourselves with the belief that once we publish our own “All the Pretty Horses,” everything we previously wrote will be appreciated again.)

“The History of Danish Dreams,” Peter Hoeg’s first novel, follows his second, “Borderliners,” into English translation, which followed his third, the universally admired “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” Which means poor Mr. Hoeg will probably have to endure his share of reviews that announce with disappointment that his first novel is different from his third.

And it is different. Hoeg chose for it a familiar model--the multi-generational family saga as social chronicle--torqued in the unfamiliar way the title suggests.

His history of four families who, over the course of generations, merge into one is told as a history of Danish dreams: dreams because both grandiose aspiration and self-delusion are so central to the ways in which families and societies operate; dreams because of the book’s pessimism concerning the likelihood of progressive change; and dreams because a history of dreams is, of course, by definition a sly critique of history itself.

The principal dream under assault may be that dream of order, prosperity and goodness that underlies Danish--and by extension, 20th century Western--culture. Though the novel spans four centuries, its main focus is on the confusions of this century, and, along the way, most aspects of modern Danish life--cultural, political, social--take a beating.

Although the novel’s cast ranges from tenement dwellers to millionaires, most of the traits exposed for our castigation are essentially bourgeois. From pre-feudal to postindustrial society, the culprit turns out to be Good Middle-Class Common Sense, that peculiar mix of quiescence and complacency and faith that all men want the same things: law and order and a steady job and respect for the eternal truths.

Such convictions are what allow the good citizens of Denmark and the West to keep their heads down and go about their business. This enables them to ignore suffering on the international scene, within their own borders or in their own families without compromising either that dream of themselves as good people or the invincible sense that their culture is progressing smoothly toward an even brighter future.

We’re treated to all manner of good and bad Danes--with the latter predominating--from those who die resisting Nazism (our century’s ultimate Manichaean test, apparently) to those who help enable it. We witness, too, their penchant for remaining admirably neutral while profiting handsomely from world wars, or their own usually unspoken agreement with the notion that the Nordics do constitute a master race.

A good deal of energy is devoted over the course of the book to the demolition of the virtues of free enterprise and “Hygge, that particular Danish blend of warmth and coziness” that they’ve been so successful in convincing the world is their principal attribute.

That attribute masks and may contribute to the poverty of their--and our--inner life, the novel insists, even to the extent that our literature and art find themselves accomplices in the tending of such ritualized hypocrisy. (“They walked along the gravel paths, past the whispering trees and the filmy patches that Carsten recognized as the ghosts of Danish writers who had wept, in Frederiksberg Gardens, the Danish writers’ lament that says, ‘Why can’t I have more mistresses? Why can’t I have more money?’ ”)

What inner life that does exist seems to consist primarily of a pinched emotional reticence and lack of generosity, as well as an impressive capacity for luxuriously melancholic self-pity--that standard why-does-nobody-like-me feeling. All of which is bad news for the children these adults are raising, and many of the novel’s most compelling passages revolve around the ways families seek, and assert even without seeking, control over their members through and over time.

Over and over again we find gathered around cribs “all the hopes of the poor and the rich and the middle class and those on the nethermost rung” and under “the weight of so many dreams that refuse to amalgamate.” It’s no wonder that child after child is unable to bear up. With parents who are either indifferent or determined to turn their homes into “barred incubators,” and with the rapidity of change in the 20th century ensuring that parents’ experiences are not only outdated but possibly dangerous as child-rearing models, the overall effect of the family dynamic is to not only keep the children submerged but to ensure that their snorkels never break the surface.

All these damaged children find perhaps their ultimate embodiment, in the third and last section of the novel, in the figure of Carsten, the perfect Dane: serene, uncomplaining, discreet, modest and ambitious, a lawyer to the wealthy so fiercely attentive to the work at hand and inattentive to its larger implications that he all but wraps up a successful prosecution before realizing that the defendant is his wife.

The novel’s strategy of building toward Carsten and his children as a culmination has its drawbacks. In the early going we often feel as if we’re in the presence of a comic historical pageant of some sort, illuminating and funny in fits and starts but fragmented enough that the narrative takes quite a while to build momentum.

Characters, especially at the beginning, are paraded by at such a pace they’re inevitably reduced in the reader’s mind (when they stay in the reader’s mind at all) to a few key traits, and motivations are accordingly reduced at such times to psychological commonplaces eloquently rendered. (“They reenact the convoluted rituals of middle-class culture, designed to foster that heartfelt, tingling sense of belonging; combined with the realization . . . that at least we here on the inside, we who have come in from the cold, stand united.”)

Too many characters are brought a little too smartly into line on the organizing principle of their dreams; most are reduced to emitting a few cheeps and tugging ever so slightly at the leash.

That leash is held by a casually chatty narrator, who intermittently intrudes to guide us on our way (“To me the situation seems symbolic. Looked at from a particular angle, it presents us with the most significant feature of the nature of the Child Welfare Services in 1920s Denmark.”); who explains his methodology (“What I, on the other hand, have to look for here is whatever it is that makes the common factors visible”); who coyly insists on the limits of his own power (“It was not long after this that Anna started to clean. This is a historical fact, and, no matter what I do, history is history. Nor do I need to excuse anything over which I have no influence”); and whose omniscience shrinks while we watch as his own stake in things becomes more and more overt. (“Again I have this urge to shout at Amalie, across the expanse of history, ‘What the hell do you mean by treating a little boy like that, making him your confidant, using him the way your customers use you--like someone you can pound away at and extract relief from?’ ”)

The playful artifice of such narration helps mediate for us the ongoing shift in the novel’s style as it gradually moves from a kind of pointedly satiric magical realism, more in the style of Danilo Kis than of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to a more traditional narrative--and narrator--as the book moves into its final section.

What we enjoy throughout are the tall tales spun with verve, intelligence and a highly developed appreciation for the absurd, always with satiric intent in mind. At one point a war profiteer holds a dinner in the gondola of a balloon for others who’ve “made their fortunes to the distant musical accompaniment of the shellfire,” during which are served dishes “devised and derived from large, dangerous animals, as a way of showing everyone that they could relax.”

And if the social criticism is at times insistent, or unsubtle, the novel’s gathering force--and its persistent return to the specifics of human suffering, particularly the suffering of children--ultimately grants such satire an affecting sadness.