Literature and Failure: James Salter's Light Years

The last section (5) of James Salter's 1975 novel, "Light Years," is the best section of the book and though not enough to entirely redeem this unusual novel - some of the best writing and most vivid passages you're likely to encounter anywhere, yet they're held together by the thinnest veil of a plot and the characters are generally dislikable - the final section does give the book a coda and, unlike so many novels, does establish a definitive conclusion. In the last section, the two main characters, the now-divorced couple Viri and Nedra, live out the last years of the lives and stutterstep toward early death: Viri, dispirited after the divorce (he realizes what he had and what he's lost) goes to Rome for a year (nice deal) where he improbably meets a 30ish Italian beauty, marries her, and slowly learns that the marriage is empty. In more or less alternate chapters we see Nedra, who has a good relationship with her now-adult daughters, reflecting on her life as she becomes ill and dies - she realizes she has accomplished little or nothing with her life - just lived it (couldn't that be enough?); Viri, meanwhile, realizes he will never be a famous architect and that he has lost everyone he's close to: Salter leaves him, at the end, about to step into the Hudson, near the house that they'd owned when young (at the outset of the book), presumably to his own death. This section is the best in the book, despite its obvious gloom, because Salter gets some distance from and perspective on his characters and we realize that the book is meant to be an examination of failed lives, as seen through a series of snapshots or video clips so to speak: in this sense, think of the difference between Light Years and the somewhat similar Tender Is the Night, in which Fitzgerald thought he was chronicling the lives of great and beautiful people, whereas Salter know he is telling the life stories of selfish, naive failures: this becomes clear at the end, but was it worth the journey to this point? Failure is definitely a suitable topic for literature, but you would hope and expect literary characters to fail grandly - to go out crying, as Melville (I think) put it: No, in Thunder.