Where to start
Begin with the smallest book. It contains the method.
A reader’s route through thirty-four titles, arranged by what each one asks of you rather than by the order it was written.
Most first-time readers are handed The New York Trilogy and told it is the door. It is the door, but it is also the hardest room in the house, and a fair number of people close it after forty pages and decide the whole building is a trick played on them. The better entry is City of Glass alone, which is the first third of that book and runs to about a hundred and thirty pages. Read it as a detective novel. Everything else the book is doing will still be there on a second pass.
What you are looking for, in any Auster, is the moment the plot stops being the point. It usually arrives early: a wrong number, an inheritance, a man on a bench with a notebook. From there the book proceeds by accident rather than cause, and the flat, exact prose is what keeps the accidents from reading as whimsy.
If you want the plainest sentence
Start with The Invention of Solitude. It is not fiction. It is a son going through his dead father’s house and finding that the man left almost nothing behind, and it is where every later book’s habit of counting things—rooms, dollars, days—was learned.
If you want a story that closes
Start with The Book of Illusions or The Music of Chance. Both end. Both are about men who lose everything and take a job. Readers who found the Trilogy evasive tend to find these two exact.
If you want the whole life in one book
Start with 4 3 2 1, and clear a fortnight. One boy, four versions, 866 pages. It is the last long novel and the one that most rewards knowing the others first—so it is a strange place to begin, and a very good place to arrive.