The novel L'Occupation des sols (1988) by Jean Echenoz presents characters that interact with and move into places is a way closely linked to the mourning they are going through. In this paper, we wish to show that this narrative meets Lacan's considerations on the language habitat and take it further through postmodern narrative aesthetics. It presents a spatialization of mourning that stresses the role of lack and image in the way we inhabit the world, made evident by a gap/filled dynamic which indicates the unspoken of the text. The pervasiveness of the maternal image, materialized as an advertisement showing the deceased mother, seems to reveal a feminine reminescent of the need for a desiring Other in the inhabiting process. The ironic superposition of the feminine and the maternal image, by playing with representation, allows both pleasure in and distance from a common trope that associates the maternal with the built environment, which gets its enveloping quality from the initial situation of the human in the womb. Yet, the maternal image, pierced by a window, makes inhabiting possible for the characters, although lightly, and to progress in their mourning.