Everything You Know - Zoe Heller

Everything You Know: Well, that was slightly unpleasant. I got half way through and realised that I had no sympathy for any of the characters, and I wasn't quite sure why I was reading the book. It was well-constructed - well, perhaps I should say well-executed, but it seemed devoid of feeling and at the same time belaboured with a slightly sappy ending - not sure if that was a twist or a lack of faith at the end in the nastiness of the rest of the book. I can't say much more for it really - it was short, it kept me up until 1 in the morning to finish it, so successful on its own terms.
Afterwards, to clean my palate I read a second-hand copy of Snow Crash in two days flat. I enjoyed that a lot (I'd forgotten a lot of the plot so it was great to rediscover that, and find that lines I'd remembered in one part of the book were actually in quite another) but there were a few flaws. Most jarring to me was that Stephenson defines loglo twice in the space of twenty pages - now, it's a good neologism, and one to be proud of coining, but you only need to define it once, don't you? Or was he already aiming for an ADHD'd market? If that were the case, why would he go on to build books of such biblical proportion later on?
As for the heavy-duty exposition - well, I haven't made my mind up on that. Is that a satire of blockbuster exposition, a necessary evil for the plot, or just somebody showing off?
Reading The Great Gatsby again now - is this some sort of literary time-travel I'm engaging in?