A certain Swedish furniture giant recently ran a TV ad in which dozens of cats went walkabout in a Wembley superstore. The implication seemed to be that nothing soothes the feline soul so much as the chance to rub up against Tofteryd TV benches and Poang footstools. Anyone resistant to the charms of either cats or blond wood interiors may want to steer clear of Will Wiles's debut novel, which prominently features both; but it's a nicely turned satire on the notion that the path to spiritual contentment lies in a pristine set of polished wooden floorboards.

Wiles's unnamed protagonist arrives in an unspecified East European capital armed with the keys to the apartment belonging to Oskar, an old university colleague who is away in America and requires someone to undertake the care and feeding of his neurotic, needy cats and exotic hardwood floors. All you need to know about Oskar is that he is an internationally renowned composer whose most celebrated work is entitled Variations on Tram Timetables. The narrator, meanwhile, is a council copywriter who hopes that a free holiday in his friend's unoccupied flat may inspire something more substantial than a series of pamphlets about rubbish collection.

As an architecture and design journalist by trade, Wiles has little difficulty evoking the rarefied austerity of an apartment in which the air "seemed to have been delivered in the bubbles of a thousand crates of San Pellegrino", and the open-plan spaces so precisely laid out that even the dust motes appear organised. As for the precious, porous floor: "It didn't have nails, it had a manicure."

Wiles's interior monologue ramps up the farcical pressure of responsibility for a floor too sensitive to stand on; and though Oskar is absent, his fussy, imperative tone rings out through a series of instructions so thorough there's even one inserted into a stash of pornography under the bed. In the event of an emergency there's also a volume on the shelves entitled Care of Wooden Floors, giving directions for the application of various compounds that seem to have been sourced from "the Body Shop rather than a hardware store".

Wiles knows about floors; he also clearly knows about cats, as the pampered pets  an indistinguishable black and white pair named Shossy and Stravvy  are incisively characterised. One relishes the manner in which they are described trotting towards their food bowl "with the expectant purposefulness of factory workers at the lunch whistle"; or the way Wiles captures their characteristically feline hauteur: "Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?"

But the housebound nature of the plot also creates the sense of a novel that, for long stretches, doesn't appear to be going anywhere. It's far more compelling in the opening stages, when the narrator overcomes his inertia to become an unwilling tourist in a bewilderingly oppressive world of antiquated trams, hostile old women and vapid Soviet-era architecture. There's a well-drawn but curiously inconsequential excursion to a lap-dancing joint with an orchestral colleague of Oskar's, and an atmospheric account of a morning spent poking round the national museum. It creates a tangible sense of a place that warrants barely a few pages of the Lonely Planet guide, while significantly enhancing the enigma of Oskar: "Why did Oskar like it here? Did he like it here, beyond the accident of it being his birthplace? His immense talent, his success, meant he could work anywhere he wanted, yet he chose here, with its headscarves and ochre, multi-zeroed banknotes."

All this whets the appetite for Wiles's imminent second book, Toxic Tourism, which is described as a "perverse travel guide" to some of the least appealing parts of the former Soviet bloc, including the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the arid Aral Sea and the Baikonur space launch facility in the desert of Kazakhstan. Care of Wooden Floors indicates that Wiles has an eye for beauty, but an even more impressive eye for ugliness. It's a novel full of impeccably stylish writing, even if its plot could afford to get out more.