For those writers around my age who were born, as the critic Parul Sehgal once put it, “under the sign of Amis,” the news that the British novelist and critic Martin Amis died on Friday seems impossible to believe. Never mind the fact that his novels brooded over, ruminated on death long before his own passing was a glimmer in fate’s eye. Never mind the stories of the man lighting each cigarette off the last, stories retold so often it seemed he’d somehow kept a smoke going continually for decades, like the Olympic flame. Advertisement It’s difficult to believe he’s...