How well does Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety hold up over time?

Have started (re)reading Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety (1987), spurred in part by R.O. Scott essay in appreciation of WS in the NYTBR. I’d first read Xing to Safety when it was new, a review copy in fact, and praised it highly as a great work of American literature (later, no doubt as a result of that review, the publishing house arranged a dinner for WS and I was seated next to him – a fine, intelligent, and thoughtful man; can’t recall what we discussed but probably mostly publishing gossip). Now, +30 years later (gulp), I’m finding (as did Scott) that the novel holds up well and is one of the few works in our literature celebrate the fast friendship of adult couples. In essence, the novel – set in the 1970s – begins with the narrator and his wife, Sally, visiting the summer Vermont retreat of their best friends, Sid and Charity Lang; it seems that Sid has recently died [ek note: this is not correct] (and Sally is in fragile health), though we know little about the back story. After careful scene-setting – WS was highly skilled in evoking the look and feel of a specific locale (in both time and space) – the narrator takes us back some 40 years to when the two couples met in Madison, Wisc., where both the men were untenured faculty members. WS gives us some really powerful scenes of dramatic writing – Sally’s difficult delivery of their 1^st child; boating accident on the lake; narrator’s nearly 24-hour drive from Madison to Vt. – but the true strength of this section of the novel come from the evocation of the academic milieu in that day: competitive, snobbish, rarefied – not all that different from the scene some 40 years later as I experienced it. The narrator (is his name Larry Morgan?), a bit of an outsider because – gasp! – he’s from UC Berkeley and not an Ivy – works twice as hard as any of his colleagues, and, though he receives no recognition from the University of Wisconsin, does begin publishing stories and, unsolicited, unagented, first try publication of his first novel. One can believe this is this is Stegner’s own story in any way, although such ascension seems impossible today. The fly in the ointment is that Sid is obviously envious of his best friend’s success – and the quality of the novel, ultimately, will be how, or whether, WS builds into his plot some kind of crisis or “collision of forces”; so far, about a third of the way through, it feels great as a piece of auto-fiction as it would be called today, but so far the characters are fortunate and blessed and there’s no fuse, yet, being lit beneath them. As a further note, today this novel would be castigated, rightly or wrongly, for its narrow scope - focused entirely on socially advantaged, white academics, politically inert (there's a wisp of anti-Semitism, though not much made of that). That said, the world WS is evoking was, in fact, all-white and rarefied - his depiction holds true to the facts of the time and place.