Mr. Marzorati was speaking late in the afternoon on Feb. 2, having sparked the loudest conversation of his term since taking over for current Times culture czar Adam Moss last summer-a Jan. 25 cover story on sex slavery in the United States dubbed "The Girls Next Door."

The 8,244-word investigation, written by Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Landesman, posited that perhaps "30,000 to 50,000" women-along with girls and boys-were being held as sex slaves in hundreds of "stash houses." More than arming the Sunday-afternoon brunch crowd in New Canaan with something to actually talk about, it stoked the ire of Times watchers, most notably the Web site Slate 's media commentator Jack Shafer, who charged the magazine with using puffed-up statistics, shoddy reporting and worse logic in order to prop up a supposition into a national epidemic.

The Times , according to a Feb. 3 report in the Daily News , officially reviewed the piece and stands by it.

Likewise, Mr. Landesman told Off the Record, "The only thing that really matters in this entire debate is the story, its integrity, its sourcing and its revelations. The story must speak for itself. It is the result of months of exhaustive reporting and painstaking editing and checking. It doesn't flinch under scrutiny; it's of vital importance. I stand behind it, and so do the editors of The New York Times Magazine ."

And Mr. Marzorati, sitting with his feet on his desk in his darkened eighth-floor office on West 43rd Street, seemed undeterred, even defiant, at the tempest that blew up so early in his tenure at the magazine's helm.

The new editor has not made dramatic or sudden changes to the magazine-he's a veteran, after all, who had a run there as editorial director for five years before taking on the top of the masthead. But as Mr. Marzorati defended his magazine from the firestorm of attacks, a picture-however hazy-emerged of how the magazine sees itself in relation to the paper that mothers it.

Anytime, he said, you run a piece that asserts something in the subterranean tunnels of American life, you're going to draw fire.

"You're going to run that kind of risk," Mr. Marzorati said. And that's the job of the magazine.

This scandal has been different from the ones that ate up Jayson Blair or Michael Finkel. There's no charge of duplicitousness here. This has become an intellectual's debate, about journalistic ethics, and about deductive reasoning and logic.

As Mr. Shafer pointed out in the first of his five pieces on the subject, Mr. Landesman relied on governmental and non-governmental sources that were merely guesstimating the actual numbers of people trafficked into the United States each year. Mr. Landesman never witnessed actual trafficking, using a few anecdotal cases to stand for what he claims are thousands of women-and he admits as much. Plus, one of the women he spoke to told him she suffers from a multiple-personality disorder.

"From beginning to end, this is an incomprehensible piece of journalism," Mr. Shafer said in an interview with Off the Record. "What he's talking about is coercion and abduction and pure enslavement. I think the piece suffers from journalism of good intentions. Landesman found some real suffering and wasn't content to describe the suffering he knew about. He's intent on portraying a greater, mass form of suffering."

"Any kind of sex crime automatically entails estimates," said Mr. Marzorati, who wrote a lengthy response to Mr. Shafer's critiques on Slate after Mr. Landesman lashed out about Mr. Shafer. "We don't even know how many women are raped in America. We don't know how many prostitutes there are in America. We don't know how many cases of child abuse there are in America. Then you add this extra level of international organized crime as you would with cocaine or anything else."

The story's reporting, Mr. Marzorati said, was involved, but not out of the ordinary.

Mr. Landesman, Mr. Marzorati said, began working on the piece last summer, after sources at the Los Angeles Police Department and the United Nations told him of the scope of human trafficking into the United States. He was in contact with the editors, and-unlike in some recent cases at The Times -they knew where he was traveling because they'd get his expense-check requests. The piece arrived in early December as an "unwieldy" first draft, Mr. Marzorati said: roughly 13,000 words. Over the next several weeks, intensive fact-checking took place, including conversations between the editors and the girls who were the subjects of the story.

"It was a very, very difficult story for him to report in the way of getting inside any organized-crime unit or syndicate would be," Mr. Marzorati said. "Also, in certain ways we were inhibited by the fact he was let in on a number of ongoing investigations, and the way he was allowed to get in on those investigations was to not mention they were taking place.

"He had many, many things off the record," Mr. Marzorati said, "on deep background, which gives some readers cause for skepticism, coupled with the fact that the reality, the existence of this phenomenon is hard to comprehend. But for most of our readers, they understand it's The Times . The Times doesn't just throw things out at the readers without going through an enormously painstaking vetting process. The piece was carefully read by a number of readers, by me many, many times, and I stand by the story."

"What happens when you do a piece like this," Mr. Marzorati continued, "it doesn't unfold in a natural, seamless narrative. You're not going to get two or three or four corroborating sources on the record. You can't just go wandering into a stash house and talk to girls. There are guards, drivers, people who usher in johns. There are all kinds of situations. Which is why these stories are hard."

No one will concede that prostitution isn't a problem in the United States. But this is sexual slavery-a term that carries with it specific connotations. Mr. Marzorati said he didn't hesitate in using the term in the piece. Is a prostitute a sex slave? What about a prostitute who is working off an exorbitant price to get smuggled into the United States illegally?

"Well you know, here's my feeling," Marzorati said. "In this country the issue of sexual trafficking isn't a liberal or mainstream feminist issue. Here, it's mostly an issue associated with the right and to some degree the Christian right, and I think in the polarized culture we have, there's suspicion with any issue associated with those groups, it seems to me. I'm quite convinced there's something called sexual slavery or sexual trafficking, for want of a better word, that's different than prostitution. Life is a matter of degree, and there is a vast degree of difference between their lives and the kind of economic system they're operating in and the age they are than prostitutes. You know, it didn't seem very complicated to me.

"We didn't use the word slave without the word sex," Mr. Marzorati said. "It does carry a meaning that's different. Just in the way there's trafficking to do manual labor or agricultural work. There's trafficking of people to perform sexual acts. It's something different. The system is something different."

Over the years, of course, The Times Magazine has jump-started the national conversation. Remember when we were scared of killer mold? Remember tackling your 3-year-old before she poked her finger inside a jar of peanut butter? Remember how women-that is, well-off women with husbands-were leaving the workplace for the sanctity of home life?

But this feels different. Larger. Certainly, as Mr. Shafer pointed out, The Times newspaper-which boasts a team of investigative reporters-might have been a better venue.

"The magazine is constantly addressing things that aren't in the paper," Mr. Marzorati said. "That's sort of our mandate. There's this vast, multi-faceted news organization here, and God knows we provide our readers with enough duplication, as hard as we try not to. Magazine pieces are written in a different way. They have a point of view. They're often written with more intensity. They're often allowed a kind of normative ending. Most of the cover stories that we do, even if they weren't the length that they were, are pieces the paper won't do. That's part of our mandate.

"There are times when I think this story belongs in another part of the paper," Mr. Marzorati said. "But it's never because the subject is too controversial or the topic is too incendiary or something like that. It's more like maybe it'd be better in Arts and Leisure. The magazine is a general-interest magazine. It's the sum of the interests of the editors here and the writers who write for us, and we respond to those curiosities."

In similar fashion, Mr. Marzorati said the piece's scope fits with the demands of a narrative structure not in place in the newsprint pages of The Times .

"The standards for a magazine piece, for a piece of long-form nonfiction, are different than they are for a news story," Mr. Marzorati said. "When you're putting together a magazine piece, organizing a magazine piece, you're allowing things like point of view and creating long scenes. This is not the function of newspaper writing, where the writing is: An event happens, you get comments from people on those events, you get other comments from people who disagree with the comments of people you just spoke to. Your conventions are such that you create something fair and balanced. That's not the magazine convention.

"When we're writing a story on these kids who write [computer] viruses and worms, we don't turn over half the story to people who say viruses and worms really aren't a big problem," Mr. Marzorati said. "That's not a convention of any magazine."

The Narrowback , by Michael Ledwidge. Atlantic Monthly Press, 304 pages, $24.

The new esthetic in high pulp: Mrs. Dalloway meets NYPD Blue . For the cross-over audience, those haute folk who sneak a James M. Cain between their Don DeLillo and Ernest Hemingway; who consider Ally McBeal a pivotal reference in feminist discourse; who appreciate naggingly "human" neurotic characters, a percussive motif, jump-cuts and vertiginous camera angles.

Good stuff in the abstract. In practice, these two recent contributions fall short. They wallow in gratuitously violent pulpiness. And they're plain-old too superficial to count as literary.

With its lush, nigh on purple, prose, Blood Acre , Peter Landesman's second novel (his first, The Raven , won the Sue Kaufman prize for first fiction) demonstrates just how far we've come from the stingy dejection of 1980's minimalism–although apparently we haven't abandoned the drugged-out, morally deficient protagonist. Nathan Stein is a corrupt lawyer, who, following in his corrupt lawyer-father's footsteps, has an inadvertently racist penchant for Hispanic women (lots of them); steals bail money from his South American clients; is more often than not stoned; and has just been implicated in the brutal murder of his half-sister lover. Déjà noir? He also adores opera–whatever that may or may not do to round out his character.

Blood Acre counts down the last minutes of the last day in the miserable life of Nathan Stein. Whoops, I told you the end. No matter. It's clear from the first that our villainous hero is careering toward death. The novel opens with the corpse of Stein's half-sister washed up on a gritty New York City beach, an electrifying beginning. After that first page, anything seems wonderfully possible–that's before the grandstanding, flittering point of view and diffuse muddle besiege the narrative.

As Stein runs from the cops, his cheated clients and his past, everyone else–especially Stein's once friend and probable half-brother, Errol Santos–is trying to solve the murder. The investigation is the device through which we learn about Stein's past and his "true love," Claire, the one woman who ever got under his skin, the only WASP he ever loved, the mother of his only son (who died). Now she's involved with Santos. Crushed under the weight of their combined emotional baggage, most of it left over from having once loved Nathan Stein, these two ineffectual "good guys" become the novel's moral barometer. Meanwhile, Stein is stumbling around, too drug-numbed and dryhearted to confront them–or his sister's death, or even his current lover whom he has abandoned to die in a hospital from some unspecified disease, and whom he has barely visited since she first took ill and lost her Latina spice.

Michael Cunningham's recent novel The Hours made Mrs. Dalloway the flavor of the month, but Mr. Landesman also borrows a page from Virginia Woolf's book. Consider Claire, her desperation forever looped into the specter of Nathan Stein: "Still sore from stitches, the delivery not the easiest, and the baby stone still in the leaching light–drink, baby, drink–already blue, already dead of everything and of nothing in particular. As if there was simply no room in this region for one more life." Blood Acre echoes with this kind of inner voice, which asserts literary cachet, but too often at the expense of clarity.

Blood Acre 's pages are crowded with tense descriptions of tempestuous skies and telephone wires over Brighton Beach, hard-core racist cop talk and third-person stream-of-consciousness narration. You have no idea (and never will) who's talking, what they're talking about, why they're all so bitter, where they're standing in relation to anything, or why we should care. Like the reader of Mrs. Dalloway , the reader of Blood Acre must forge her way through the perpetual disorientation created by untethered impressionism. Moments such as: "He pulls the rubber stopper to let it all drain. The water slides slowly and evenly down the wall of the sink, the drain gasps, and the rest of it is sucked away. She did this. She killed me." (It's anybody's guess which "she" Nathan is blaming, and whether "drain" makes a better verb or noun.) At least Mrs. Dalloway , unlike Blood Acre , rewards the reader's hard work with insight, epiphany and really smart prose. And in NYPD Blue , as in much classic pulp, the conflict is between good and evil masquerading alternatively as each other; but the conflict in Blood Acre belongs to the reader: It takes the form of resistance to the dreary, disconnected, dangerous world here created.

The promise of Michael Ledwidge's debut The Narrowback comes from the premise rather than its literary finesse. Once again, we have a crime-driven novel banking on an ethnic angle, despondency and father obsession. But this time the action is easier to follow: connect-the-dots easy.

The antihero, Tom Farrell, starts out sober and only slips into that annoying stoned numbness after his perfect crime (the one that's going to get him out of the old neighborhood and on with a straight life as an art student in California) goes badly wrong. The snag? The gang is infiltrated by an Irish Republican Army soldier who wants to steal the spoils to fund the rebel cause–Tom and his crew waste him, of course. As if that weren't enough, while trying to pawn the loot Tom loses his temper with the godfather of the Albanian Mafia and clocks him with the butt of his Smith & Wesson. So the Albanians, the I.R.A. and the police are all in hot pursuit of Tom and his bag of money. He chooses this moment to tumble off the wagon.

Tom Farrell is a narrowback, an Irish-American from an Irish-American inner-city neighborhood. The paramilitary American branch of the I.R.A. is no longer all that new to readers and moviegoers, though Albanian organized crime is still something of a novelty. Original or not, these worlds are only sketchily evoked. Shifting the landscape, Brooklyn to Bronx, giving the bad guys Irish or Albanian accents–it's flimsy. We want transport, not set decoration.

Absent the attention and elaboration that could have made The Narrowback a very cool read, we are left to contend with the degree of compassion we feel, or fail to feel, for the main character.

A scene from Farrell's night wanderings: He meets an uptown girl in a nightclub, gets her high, gets a blowjob, brings her to the Bronx, and loses her absent-mindedly in the midst of ricocheting bullets, pit bulls and a botched drug deal. His morning-after realization of what he'd done–"Jesus God–the girl–he'd abandoned her in that place"–comes across as lip service paid to the plot; the scene itself is just another vignette in a pageant of generic tough-guy behavior.

Tom Farrell is a tortured soul, with a gimpy vision of redemption. Clues suggest that the tough guy is complicated: He wants to make good on his life; he has some sense of loyalty to his best friend (although under the mistaken impression he's already been murdered, he beds the best friend's girlfriend); he can't bring himself to fire a machine gun into a crowded room of Albanian mobsters because he sees a child among them; he misses his long-lost brother who died of AIDS; and, like all of the novel's secondary characters, he has father issues. But we never really get into his psyche. He's shut down, motivated by ill-conceived values and loyalties, which he betrays even though they're ill-conceived.

These two novels suffer from too much hovering: the malaise of superficial sense of place and characterization, free-floating narration. They also suffer from the curse of being good enough to suggest they could be better. Blood Acre and The Narrowback reach for the glory of pulp and the grandeur of literature–Quentin Tarantino with tone. They end up plundering stereotype and cheap thrill–forgettable imitations languishing on the oh-so-cruel city streets.