The entire time while reading this I thought to myself "E.T.A. Hoffmann could have written this story 10x better". I don't know if the German translation of this was off (it certainly wasn't by the same translator as my edition of Moby Dick) or if Melville loses his charm when he spends too much time on land, figuratively.
Besides the Hoffmann parallel, I also found myself reminded of newspaper columnists who cement their constant winks and smug grins within each paragraph they publish - one could easily rewrite this to center around some guy from a big newspaper who has just bought a fancy grill and whose girlfriend is unhappy with it.
As someone who sees Moby Dick as a central part of her stack of all time favorite books, this was quite disappointing. I want to give some of Melville's other maritime novels a fair shot before writing them off but man... This felt quite pointless.