Maybe there's something I just don't get about James Salter's Light Years

Let's just keep going, why don't we?, with more great scenes from James Salter's "Light Years," including vivid account of friend Peter's slow death by scleroderma, in which body slowly turns hard as rock; the now mid-40s divorced Nedra decides to take up acting and tries to join an experimental troupe in Vermont, is rejected, but takes up instead with the leading male actor; younger daughter Danny gets married to the brother of one of her lovers - each of these moments so perfectly rendered, yet I still have the same problem with this novel that I've discussed in previous posts, its lack of coherence, its stunted narrative, and its unlikable characters. Has ever a novel contained such polarities - in some respects so great and in other respects dismal? I will probably finish it tonight and will try my best to come to terms with this novel - maybe there's something here that I'm missing entirely, maybe by the end I will look back and see a brilliant portrait of a failed marriage and two failed lives? Maybe - but I just keep seeing these people, in particular the central characters, Viri and Nedra, whom we first meet as young parents and are now edging past divorce and into middle age, as selfish, self-involved, privileged, and ungrateful: Nedra always wishing she could travel and be wealthy - she is and she does, by most accounts, and wishing she could be an artist - which requires a talent and dedication she does not seem to have; Viri lamenting the failure of his marriage, not that he did much to help it, and his obscurity as an architect - but maybe it's a justifiable obscurity, as there's no evidence that he has talent other than for working well with clients. Characters in novels often fight against the boundaries and restrictions of their lives and their culture, but these characters don't fight against anything, they whine.