Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes? Some handle the challenge with aplomb. Bill Cheng’s “Southern Cross the Dog” and Louise Erdrich’s “The Round House” come to mind. Others fail: At one point in Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help,” a black woman compares her skin color with that of a cockroach. To write difference well demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent.

In late November 1987, Tawana Brawley was found in her upstate New York hometown, covered in racist and misogynist slurs, feces in her hair. The teenager said she had been kidnapped and raped by several white men, including police officers and (in a detail she added later) an assistant district attorney. The horrifying story quickly generated national headlines.

Al Sharpton and two lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, began to represent the young woman and “manage” her interests. There were holes in Brawley’s story, though, and the case quickly inflamed racial tensions. (Granted, anything that reminds people racism exists tends to “inflame racial tensions.”) Nearly a year later, a grand jury determined Brawley had lied. The case remains divisive to this day because it touches on so many fraught issues: race, class, sexual violence and the winners and losers in America’s justice system.

Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, “The Sacrifice,” is a fictional retelling of the Brawley story, set in the invented Red Rock neighborhood of Pascayne, N.J., and based so heavily on the facts of the actual case that you could think of it as true-crime fan fiction. The novel opens with Ednetta Frye frantically searching for her daughter in the streets of Red Rock. From there, it traverses multiple points of view to describe how a community reacts to tragedy even as the truth remains elusive. At the center of the constellation of characters is Sybilla Frye, the young woman found bloody and bruised, degraded in an abandoned factory.